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About Google Book Search Google's mission is to organize the world's information and to make it universally accessible and useful. Google Book Search helps readers discover the world's books while helping authors and publishers reach new audiences. You can search through the full text of this book on the web at |http : //books . google . corn/ BERKELEY ^ LIBRARY UNIVF.RSITY OF ^ CALIFORNIA ^ th -435 7*1 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE BY VICTOR HUGO dTransIateti By MELVILLE B. ANDERSON SIXTH EDITION CHICAGO A. G. McCLURG AND COMPANY 1899 Copyright By a. C. McClurg and Co. A.D. 1886. TO ENGL A N D s BeUtcote tps Boaft» r^-ff GLORIFICA TION OF HER POET. I TELL ENGLAND THE TRUTH ; BUT AS A LAND ILLUSTRIOUS AND FREE, I ADMIRE HER, AND AS AN ASYLUM, I LOVE HER. VICTOR HUGO. Hautkvillb Housb, 1864. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE PREFACE THE true title of this work should be, ' Con- cerning Shakespeare/ The Author's original incentive was the désire to "introduce," as they say in England, the new translation of Shakespeare to the public. The tie that binds him so closely to the translator need net deprive him of the privi- lège of commendîng the translation.^ From an- other side, however, and still more closely, his conscience was engaged by the subject itself. In contemplating Shakespeare, ail the questions re- lating to art hâve arisen in the Author's mind. To deal with thèse questions is to set forth the mission of art ; to deal with thèse questions is to set forth the duty of human thought toward man. Such an opportunity for speaking some true words imposes an obligation that is not to be shirked, especially in a time like ours. This the Author 1 Made by the poefs son, François-Victor Hugo. — Tr. Viîi PREFACE. has understood. He has not hesîtated to take every avenue of approach to thèse complex ques- tions of art and of civîlizatîon, varying the horizon as the perspective shifted, and acceptîng every hint supplied by the urgency of the task. From such an enlarged conception of the subject thîs book has sprung. HautevUle House^ 1864. TRANSLATOR^S PREFACE THE work herewîth presented to the public belongs to the literatiire of power rather than to the lîterature of knowledge. Beguîlîng his exile, remote from great lîbraries and from books of référence, by thîs sweeping review of ail that he regarded as worthiest and noblest in the whole range of humane letters, Victor Hugo is sometimes pardonably inaccurate in détails. The Translator has deemed it his duty to re- produce faithfuUy the text, and has taken the liberty to correct in footnotes (signed Tr.) the errors that seemed to hîm most notîceable, es- pecially those touching the life and works of Shakespeare. That he has corrected ail which may appear important to others, he cannot venture to hope. Fortunately, this great work does not dépend for its value upon the accuracy of its statements of fact, nor even, chiefly, upon the X TRANSLATOR^S PREFACE, lîght ît throws upon the lîfe and genîus of Shake- speare. It îs mainly to be prîzed as a masterly statement of the Author's ideas concernîng the proper relation of literature to human life, — a statement illuminated by wonderfui flashes of poetry and éloquence, and illustrated by strong characterizations of many famous books and men. This is not to say, however, that the présent work wîll not serve, better than most others, as an introduction to Shakespeare, to iEschylus, and perhaps to some other of the immortals whom ît so glowingly célébrâtes. The Translator is responsible for the table of contents, and for the index, which makes no pre- tence of being exhaustive. M. B. A. PuRDUE UNrvKRsrrv, Lafayette, Ind., October^ 188& TopiCAL Table of Contents. part Sfiv&U BOOK I. SHAKESPEARE'S LIFE. CHAPTER I. PA6B Description o£ Marine Terrace» Isle of Jersey. — The Exiles . 3 CHAPTER II. Shakespeare and the Océan 7 CHAPTER III. Shakespeare's Birthplace. — Orthography of Name. — Youth- ful Escapades and Marriage. — London under Elizabeth. — The Actors, the Théâtres, the Audience. — Molière's Théâtre and Louis XIV.'s Patronage. — Shakespeare's Person. — The Tavems. — Chronology of Shakespeare's Pla3rs. — Shakespeare Manager and Money-lender. — New Place; Mrs. Davenant. — The Last Years 9 xiî TOFICAL TABLE OF CONTENTS, CHAPTER IV. PAGB Shakespeare's Life embittered — Contemporary Notice. — The Puritans close the Play-houses. — Shakespeare's Famé after the Restoration. — Dryden, Shaftesbury, Nahum Tate. — Shakespeare's " éclipse " 29 CHAPTER V. Recasts of Plays. — - Voltaire, Garrick, Malone ••••.. 54 BOOK IL MEN OF GENIUS. CHAPTER I. Art, Nature, God. — Science and the SupematuraL — The Poet's Inspiration 36 CHAPTER IL The Poet's Ascent to the Idéal. — Homer characterized. — Job characterized. — iEschylus characterized. — Isaiah characterized. — Ezekiel characterized. — Lucretius char- acterized. — Juvenal characterized. — Tacitus character- ized : Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, Nero. — Saint John characterized. — Saint Paul characterized. — Dante char- acterized. — Rabelais characterized. — Cervantes charac- terized. — Shakespeare characterized é • . 41 CHAPTER IIL The Dynasty of Genius. — The Wreck of iËschylus . ... 82 CHAPTER IV. The Great, Anonymous, Collective Works of Orient and Occident. — The German Genius : Beethoven. — " Good Taste '* an Incubus upon Genius 84 TOPICAL TABLE OF CONTENTS. xiii BOOK III. ART AND SCIENCE. CHAPTER I. PAGB Poetry made imperishable by Printing. — The Book the In- strument of Civili2ation . 95 CHAPTER II. Number the Basis of Poetry and of Science 99 CHAPTER III. Poetry, bemg absolute in Nature, incapable of Progress . . ici CHAPTER IV. The Relative and Progressive Nature of Science. — The Im- provement of the Télescope. — Examples of Outgrown Scientîiic Notions. — The Errors of Pythagoras. — The Errors of Chrysippus. — Science transitory, Art abiding. —The Etemal Power of Art illustrated by the Efifect of Lucretius upon Hugo 105 CHAPTER V. The Décline of Poetry impossible . • . • • 118 XIV TOPICAL TABLE OF CONTENTS. BOOK IV. THE ANCIENT SHAKESPEARE. CHAPTER I. PAGB Formidable Character of iEschylus. -— Vastness and Compre- hensiveness of the Drama. — Tragic Terror of iËschylus . 122 CHAPTER II. Description of the Greek Théâtre. — Description of the Rep- résentation of a Greek Play 126 CHAPTER III. The Renown of iEschylus after his Death 132 CHAPTER IV. Ptolemy Evergetes and the Alexandrian Library. — ^schylus stolenfrom Athens and transferred to Alexandria. — The Alexandrian Library burned by Omar 135 CHAPTER V. Attempts to justîfy Omar. — Shakespeare nearly meets the fate of .£schylus 140 CHAPTER VI. ".«schylus Lost."— The Number of Works irrevocably destroyed 143 TOPICAL TABLE OF CONTENTS. XV CHAPTER VIL PAGB The Affinity of iEschylus with Asîa. — His Geography.— His Priesthood of Nature. — His Bold Familiarity 146 CHAPTER VIII. The Relation of Aristophanes to iEschylus. — The Opposition of Socrates to their Religions Enthusiasm. — The Broad Farce of iEschylus. — The Alarming Mirth of Art. — The Two Ears of Poetry 153 CHAPTER IX. Greece the great Civilizer. — The Drama in her Colonies. — .£schylus the Poet of the Greek Fatherland 160 CHAPTER X. Ezplanatîon of the Loss of Books in Antîquity. — Gutenberg has made the Book immortal. — The Ruins qf Greek and Roman Books. — Sources of our Knowledge of iËschylus. —Similarity ofiËschylus to Shakespeare 164 BOOK V. SOULS. CHAPTER I. The Genesis of the Soûl. — No Tangible Law. — The Coïnci- dences of Genius. — The Sacred Horror of the Great Mys- tery. — The Reality of the Soûl. — The Reality of Great Soûls. — Their Lofty Functions. — The Origin and the Mission of Genius 170 CHAPTER IL God the Ezhaostless Source of Genius 183 XVÎ TOPICAL TABLE OF CONTENTS. ]Part ^econO. BOOK L SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS- CHAPTER L PAGX The Censurers af Shakespeare: Forbes, Greene, Rymer, Dryden, Ben Jonson, Warburton, Foote, Pope, Voltaire, Dr. Johnson, Frederick the Great, Coleridge, Knight, Hunter, Delandine i8|^ CHAPTER IL Shakespeare's Reality. — The Inexorable Law o£ his Genius. — His Sovereign Horror and his Charm. — His Philoso- phy. — His Imaginative Arabesque. — His Psychology. — His History. — His Universality 195 CHAPTER III. Shakespeare's Antithesis a Double Refraction of Nature . . 203 CHAPTER IV. The Orthodox and Academical School condemns the Luxu- riance of Great Poets. — No Flirtation with the Muses. — Genius bound over to keep the Peace 205 CHAPTER V. Shakespeare a Trial to the '* Sober " Critics ; his Fertility and VirUity. — Shakespeare intoxicated with Nature . . . . 21X TOPICAL TABLE OF CONTENTS. XVli BOOK IL SHAKESPEARE'S WORK. — THE CULMI- NATING POINTS. CHAPTER L PAGS The Great Poets Creators kA Human T3rpes. — Theîr Kinship with God.— The In£amy of their Censors 219 CHAPTER IL The Nature af tfae Living Types prodaced by the Poets. — How they differ from Historic Persons 223 CHAPTER III. The Man o£ .^schylus» Prometheus; the Man of Shake- speare, Hamlet 228 CHAPTER IV. Prometheus on Caucasus. — Hamlet 230 CHAPTER V. The Feigned Madness o£ Hamlet.— The Character of Ham- let 234 CHAPTER VI. Macheth. — Othello. — Lear: Time of the Action; Nature of the Subject ; Character of Lear ; Lear and Cordelia . 240 b xviiî TOPICAL TABLE OF CONTENTS. BOOK III. ZOILUS AS ETERNAL AS HOMER. CHAPTER I. PAGE A Chapter of Calumnies 250 CHAPTER IL The Pédants and the Police 254 CHAPTER III. Calumnîatîon o£ Voltaire and Rousseau. — Their Burial in the Panthéon. — Their Bones thrown into a Hole 257 CHAPTER IV. Pedantry solidtous about Genius 26^ CHAPTER V. The Academical View of Genius. — The Comfortable Mîddle- Class View 263 CHAPTER VI. The Sun offensive to Weak Eyes. — Genius portentous. — Its Humanity, Sympathy, Love, Beauty 266 TOPICAL TABLE OF CONTENTS, XÎX BOOK IV. CRITICISM. CHAPTER I. PAGE The Double Plots of Shakespeare's Plays a Reflection of ail the Art of the Renascence 274 CHAPTER II. Genius to be accepted as Nature is accepted 377 CHAPTER III. Pegasus a Gift-Horse. — Prometheus the Progenitor of Mab and Titania 279 CHAPTER IV. The Romantic School has hnitated neither Shakespeare nor .£schylus 282 CHAPTER V. The Poet origmal, personal, inimitable 285 CHAPTER VI. Définition of the Officiai French School of Letters. — How the Poet panders to the Mob. — The Mob described. — The High Mission of the Poet to make himself a Sacri- fice for many 288 XX TOPICAL TABLE OF CONTENTS. BOOK V. THE MINDS AND THE MASSES. CHAPTER I. PAGB Destruction and Construction 294 CHAPTER II. Literature secrètes Civilization. — The True Sodalism . . . 295 CHAPTER IIL The Nadir of Democracy 298 CHAPTER IV. Animalism not the Goal of Man 301 CHAPTER V. Literature not for the Lettered only 303 CHAPTER VI. The Irony of Macchiavelli and of Voltaire 305 CHAPTER VIL The Poet a Teacher. —The Mob at the Théâtre. —The Mob open to the Idéal 307 CHAPTER VIIL How to restore the Idéal to the Human Mind 310 toptcàl table of contents, xxi BOOK VL THE BEAUTIFUL THE SERVANT OF THE TRUE. CHAPTER I. PAGB Utility thc Test of Art — Utility of iEschylus and of the Bible. — ThePoetaHelper 312 CHAPTER II. No Loss of Beauty f rom Goodness. — " Arl for Art's sake." — Utility of Primitive Poetry. — Greatness of Juvenal . . . 320 CHAPTER III. The Power of Poetry in Barbarous Times 324 CHAPTER IV. Thc Obligation of the Poet Jo Political Vigilance 327 CHAPTER V. Bayle and Goethe. — The Poet's Passion for the Right. — Louis XIV. and Racine. — The OflScial and Academical Conception of the Poet's Fonction. — The Poet a Nour- isher, a Comforter, a Liberator 330 Xxil TOPICAL TABLE OF CONTENTS. Part Cbfrti^ CONCLUSION. BOOK I. AFTER DEATH; SHAKESPEARE; ENGLAND. CHAPTER I. PAGB Six Feet of Earth the End of AU for the Soldier, the Begin- ning of Ail for the Poet 341 CHAPTER n. Shakespeare the Chief Glory of England. — England, Sparta, Carthage. — England's Statues. — Her Snobbishness . . 348 CHAPTER ni. Shakespeare and Elizabeth. —- Shakespeare and the Bible. — Coldness of England to Shakespeare. — English Prudîsh- ness. — Philistine Criticism. — Shakespeare and Mr. Cal- craft, the Hangman 355 CHAPTER IV. England in Debt to Shakespeare. — France to Joan of Arc. — Voltaire the Reviler of both 362 CHAPTER V. Shakespeare's True Monument. — A Monument indiffèrent to Shakespeare, important to England 364 CHAPTER VI. The Centennial Anniversaries of Shakespeare 368 TOPICAL TABLÉ OF CONTEHTS, xxiil BOOK IL THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. CHAPTER I. PAGB The Nineteenth Century born of the French Révolution. — Romanticism. — " Literary *93." — The Eruption of Truth in thc Soûl. — The Need of Prompt Action on the part of Thinkers. — Discouragement — The Practical Functions of Thinkers 371 BOOK III. TRUE HISTORY. — EVERY ONE PUT IN HIS PLACE. CHAPTER I. The Age of thc Warrior gone. — Finance hostile to Heroes. — Cost of the Napoleonic Wars 385 CHAPTER IL Imbedlity the Warrior's Excuse. — Things Tyrants, and Ty- rants Things. — Horrible Examples of Tyrannie Cruelty. —The Wolf the Fruit of the Forest — The Thinker the Founder of Civilization 390 CHAPTER III. Hîstory must be rewritten. — Examples of its Triviality and Sycophancy. — Cantemir and Karamsin. — Loyal History: More Exsunples. — History ignorant of the Essentîal Facts of Civilization : Examples 396 XXÎV TOPICAL TABLE Ofi CO^TÊÎ^TS. CHAPTER IV. PAGE True History described and prophesied. — Truth coming to Light. — The Dynasty of Genius not oppressive .... 408 CHAPTER V. The New Aspect of Things. — The Potentates put to Flîght by the Dreamers 415 PART I. ^ PART FIRST. BOOK I. SHAKESPEARE. — HIS LIFE. CHAPTER I. ADOZEN years ago, on an îsland near the coast of France, a house, at every season of for- bidding aspect, was growing especially gloomy by reason of the approach of winter. The west wind, which had full sweep there, was piling thick upon this dwelling those enveloping fogs November in- terposes between sun and earth. In autumn, night falls early ; the narrow Windows made the days still briefer within, and deepened the sombre twilight of the house. This house was flat-roofed, rectilinear, correct, square, and covered with a fresh coat of white- wash; it was Methodism in brick and stone. Nothing is so glacial as this English whiteness; ît seems to ofTer you a kind of polar hospitality. One thinks with longing of the old peasant huts of France, wooden and black, yet cheerful with clusterîng vines. 4 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Adjoîning the house was a quarter-acre of slop- îng garden-ground, walled in, broken by granité steps and breast-walls, — a bare, treeless garden, wîth more stones than leaves. This little uncul- tivated patch abounded in tufts of marigolds, which bloom in autumn, and which the poor people of the country eat cooked with the con- ger-eel. The neighboring sea-shore was concealed from this garden by a rise of ground, upon which there was a field of grass with some nettles and a big hemlock. From the house was seen on the horizon at the rîght, in a little wood upon a hill, a tower said to be haunted ; at the left was seen the dike. The dike was a row of great piles set upright in the sand agaînst a wall ; thèse dry, gaunt, knotty logs resem- bled an array of leg-bones and knee-caps afflicted with anchylosis. Revery, which likes to accept fancies as material for enigmas, might inquîre to what race of men thèse three-fathom tibias had belonged. The south front of the house faced the garden, the north front a deserted road. A corridor as an entry on the ground flopr, a kitchen, a greenhouse, and a court-yard, then a little drawing-room look- ing out upon the lonely road, and a pretty large, dimly lighted study ; on the second and third floors, neat, cold, freshly painted chambers, barely fur- nished, with white shrouds for window-hangings. Such was this dwelling, where the roar of the sea was always heard. This house, a heavy, white, rectangular cube, chosen by its inmates upon a chance indication WILLÏAM SHAKESPEARE. 5 (possibly the indications of chance are not always without design), had the form of a tomb. Its in- mates were a group — a family rather — of pro- scribed persons. The eldest was one of those men who at certain moments are found to be in the way in their country. He came from an assem- bly; the others, who were young, came from prison. To hâve written, furnishes a justification for bolts : whîther should reflection lead, if not to the dungeon? The prison had set them at large into banish- ment. The old man, the father, was accompanied by his whole family, except his eldest daughter, who could not follow him. His son-in-law was with her. Often were they leaning round a table, or seated on a bench, silent, grave, ail of them secretly thinking of^hose two absent ones. Why had thèse people installed themselves in a house so unattractive ? By reason of haste, and from a désire to be as soon as possible anywhere but at the inn. Doubtless, also, because it was the first house to let that they had met with, and because exiles are not lucky. This house — which it is time to rehabilitate a little and console ; for who knows whether, in its loneliness, it is not sad at what we hâve just said about it? A house has a soûl — this house was called Marine Terrace. The arrivai was mourn- ful ; but, after ail, we would not deny that the stay în it was agreeable, and Marine Terrace has left to those who then dwelt there none but affectionate and dear remeiÉbrances. And what we say of Marine Terrace, we say also of the Island of 6 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. Jersey. Places of suffering and trial corne to hâve a kind of bitter sweetness, which later on causes them to be regretted; they hâve a stern hospîtality which appeals to the conscience. There had been, before them, other exiles in that îsland. This is not the time to speak of them. We mention only that the most ancient of whom tradition, or perhaps a legend, has pre- served the memory was a Roman, Vipsanius Mi- nator, who employed his exile in extending, in the interest of his country's supremacy, the Ro- man wall of which you may still see some parts, like bits of hillock, near a. bay named, I think, St. Catherine's bay. This Vipsanius Minator was a consular dignitary, an old Roman so infatu- ated with Rome that he stood in the way of the Empire. Tiberius exiled him to this Cimmerian island, Cœsarea ; ^ according to others, to one of the Orkneys. Tiberius did more ; not content with exile, he decreed oblivion. It was forbîdden to the orators of the Senate and the Forum to pro- nounce the name of Vipsanius Minator. The ora- tors of the Forum and the Senate, and history, hâve obeyed, — a resuit regarding which Tiberius, for that matter, entertained no doubt. That arrogance in commanding, which proceeded so far as to give orders to men's thoughts, characterized certain an- cient governments newly arrived at one of those firm situations where the greatest sum of crime produces the greatest sum of security. Let us return to Marine Terrace. 1 The ancient name of the Island of Jersey, the place of Hugo's exile. — Tr. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, J One morning, near the end of November, two of the inhabitants of the place, the father and the youngest of the sons, were seated in the lower parlor. They were silent, like shipwrecked per- sons who meditate. Without, it rained, the wind blew, the house was as if deafened by the outer roaring. Both went on thinking, absorbed, perhaps, by thoughts of this coincidence between the beginning of winter and the beginning of exile. Suddenly the son raised his voice and asked the father, — ** What think you of this exile? " ** That it will be long." " How do you intend to employ it?" The father answered, " I « shall gaze at the océan." There was a silence. The father was the first to speak : — "And you?" " I," said the son, " I shall translate Shakespeare." CHAPTER IL There are, îndeed, men whose soûls are like the sea. Those billows, that ebb and flood, that inex- orable going and coming, that noise of ail the winds, that blackness and that translucency, that végéta- tion peculiar to the deep, that democracy of clouds in fuU hurricane, those eagles flecked with foam, 8 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, those wonderful star-risings reflected in mysterîous agitation by millions of luminous wave-tops, — con- fused heads of the multitudinous sea, — the errant lightnings wl^ich seem to watch, those prodîgious sobbings, those half-seen monsters, those nights of darkness broken by howlings, those furies, those frenzies, those torments, those rocks, those ship- wrecks, those fleets crushing each other, mingling their human thunders with the divine thunders and staining the sea with blood ; then that charm, that mildness, those festivals, those gay white sails, those fishing-boats, those songs amid the uproar, those shining ports, those mists rising from the shore, those cities at the horizon*s edge, that deep blue of sky and water, that useful asperity, that bitter savor which keeps the world wholesome, that harsh sait without which ail would putrefy ; those wraths and those appeasements, that ail in one, the unforeseen amid the changeless, the vast marvel of inexhaus- tibly varied monotony, that smoothness after an upheaval, those hells and those heavens of the unfathomed, infinité, ever-moving deep, — ail thîs may exist in a mind, and then that mind is called genius, and you hâve -^schylus, you hâve Isaiah, you hâve Juvenal, you hâve Dante, you hâve Michael Angelo, you hâve Shakespeare; and ît is ail one whether you look at thèse soûls or at the sea.^ 1 The reader is invîted to compare this passage with the clo- quent interprétation of it at the beginning of Swinburne's ' Study pf, Shakespeare.' — T;^. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. CHAPTER III. I. William Shakespeare was born at Strat- ford-on-Avon, in a house under the tiles of which was concealed a confession of the Catholic faith beginning with thèse words, " I, John Shakespeare." John was the father of William. The house, situ- ated in Henley Street, was humble; the cham- ber in which Shakespeare came into the world, wretched: the walls were whitewashed, the black rafters laid crosswise ; at the farther end was a tol- erably large window with two small panes, where you may read to-day, among other names, that of Walter Scott. This poor dwelling sheltered a de- cayed family. The father of William Shakespeare had been an alderman ; his grandfather had been bailiff. Shakespeare signifies " shake-spear ; " the family had for a coat-of-arms an arm holding a spear, — allusîve arms, confirmed, they say, by Queen Elizabeth in 1595, and visible, at the time we Write, on Shakespeare's tomb in the church of Stratford-on-Avon.^ There is little agreement about 1 An application for a grant of coat-armor to his father was made in 1596, and another in 1599; but the matter seems to hâve gone no farther than the drafting of designs by the heralds. The poet's relatives, (however, at a later date assumed his right to the coat suggested for his father in 1596. The obvions pun upon the name was not overlooked either by eulogists or by defamers. For ezample, an ancient epigram reads, — " 'fhou hast so used thy Pen (or shook thy Speare) That Poets startie, nor thy wit corne neare." — Tr. lO WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, the orthography of the vvord Shake-spear as a family name ; it is written variously, — Shakspere, Shakespere, Shakespeare, Shakspeare: in the eighteenth century it was habitually written Shake- spear. The présent translater^ has adopted the spelling Shakespeare as the only true one, and gives for it unanswerable reasons. The only ob- jection ^ that can be made is that Shakspeare is more easily pronounced than Shakespeare; that cutting off the e mute is perhaps useful ; and that in the interest of the names themselves and to facilitate their wider currency, posterity has, as regards proper names, a certain euphonie right It is évident, for example, that in French poetry the orthography Shakspeare is necessary; however, convinced by the translater, we write, in prose, Shakespeare. 2. The Shakespeare family had some original drawback, probably its Catholicism, which caused its downfall. A little after the birth of William, Alderman Shakespeare was no more than " butcher John." WilHam Shakespeare made his début in a slaughter-house. At the âge of fifteen he entered his father s shambles, bared his arm, and killed 1 That îs, the translater of Shakespeare's works. * This " objection " is of course such to a Frenchman only. Indeed this whole orthographical excursus, unintelligible as it must be to the English reader, is retained only upon the gênerai princi- ple of fidelity. The translater referred to is François Victor Hugo (see Préface). It may be added that out of the scores of différent spellings of the name, the New Shakspere Society has adopted the orthography Shakspere^ upon the ground that it was so spelled by a very eminent authority, — the bearer of the name himseli — Tr. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, 1 1 sheep and calves, — " in a high style," says Aubrey. At eighteen he married. Between the days of the slaughter-house and the marriage he composed a quatrain. This quatrain, directed against the neighboring villages, is his maiden effort in poetry. He there says that Hillborough is illiistrious for its ghosts, and Bidford for its drunkards. He made this quatrain (being tipsy himself) in the open air, under an apple-tree still celebrated in the country in conséquence of this midsummer-nîght*s dream. In this night and in this dream, where there were lads and lasses, in this drunken fit and under this apple-tree, he discovered that Anne Hathaway was a pretty girl.^ The wedding fol- lowed. He espoused this Anne Hathaway, older than himself by eight years, had a daughter by her, then twins, boy and girl, and left her; and this wife disappears from Shakespeare's life, to reappear only in his will, where he leaves her his second-best bed, " having probably," says a biographer, " em- ployed the best one with others." Shakespeare, like La Fontaine, did but sip at married life. His wife beîng put aside, he was a schoolmaster, then clerk to an attorney, then a poacher. This poach- îng was made use of later to justify the statement 1 For the story, which Victor Hugo has, after hîs fashion, very much improved upon, see Halliwell-Phillipps*s * Outlines of the Life of Shakespeare,' 3d éd., pp. 205, 206, and the accompanying " illustrative notes," pp. 354-359. The quatrain referred to runs as f oUows : — " Piping Pebworth, Dancing Marston, Haunted Hillborough, Hungry Grafton, Dadgeing Exhall, Papist Wicksford, Beggarly Broom, and Drunken Bidford." — Tx. 12 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, that Shakespeare had been a thief. One day he was caught poaching in Sir Thomas Lucy*s parle. They threw him into prison ; they began proceed- ings. Thèse being spitefuUy followed up, he saved himself by flight to London. In order to gain a livelihood, he began by holding horses at the doors of théâtres. Plautus had turned a millstone. This business of holding horses at the doors still existed at London in the last century, and it brought to- gether a kind of small band or corps that they called ** Shakespeare's boys." 3. You may call London the black Babylon — gloomy by day, magnificent by night. To see London is a sensation; it is uproar under smoke — mysterious analogy: uproar is the smoke oS noise. Paris is the capital of one side of hu" manity; London is the capital of the opposite: side. Splendid and melancholy town! There activity is tumult, and the people swarm like ants. One is free there, and yet confined. Lon- don is an orderly chaos. The London of the sixteenth century did not resemble the London of our day ; but it was already an immense town. Cheapside was the main street; St. PauFs, now a dôme, was then a spire. The plague was nearly as much at home in London as in Constantinople. There was not, in fact, much difiference between Henry VIIL and a sultan. Fires (as in Constanti- nople, again) were fréquent in London, on account of the populous parts of the town being built entirely of wood. In the streets there was but one carriage, — the carriage of her Majesty; not a cross-road where they did not cudgel some WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 13 pickpocket with the flaîl,^ whîch is still retaîned at Groningen for thrashing wheat. Manners were rough, almost savage; a fine lady rose at six, and went to bed at nine. Lady Géraldine Kildare, to whom Lord Surrey inscribed verses, break- fasted off a pound of bacon and a pot of béer. Queens — the wives of Henry VIIL — knitted mittens, and did not even object to their being of coarse red wobl. In this London the Duchess of Suffolk took care of her hen-house, and, with her dress tucked up to her knees, threw corn to the ducks in the court below. To dine at midday was to dine late. It was the delight of the upper classes to go and play at " hot cockles " at my Lord Leicester's. Anne Boleyn played there; she knelt down, with eyes bandaged, for this game, without knowing that she was rehears- îng for a play of a différent kînd upon the scaffbld. This same Anne Boleyn, destined for the throne, whence she was to go still farther, was perfectly dazzled when her mother bought her three linen chemises, at sixpence the ell, and promised her, for the Duke of Norfolk's bail, a pair of new shoes worth five shillings. 4. Under Elizabeth, in spite of the wrath of the Puritans, there were in London eight compa- nies of actors, — those of Newington Butts, Earl Pembroke's company, Lord Strange's retainers, the Lord Chamberlain's troop, the Lord High AdmiraFs troop, the company of Blackfriars, the childreri of St. PauFs, and, in the first rank, the 1 A purely conjectural translation, Victor Hugo's word being " drotschbloch." — Tr. 14 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Bear-baiters. Lord Southampton went to the play every evening. Nearly ail the théâtres were situ- ated on the banks of the Thames, — a fact which increased the number of watermen. The play- rooms were of two kinds: some merely open tavern-yards, a platform set up against a wall, no ceiling, rows of benches placed on the ground, for boxes the Windows of the tavern. The per- formance took place in the broad daylight and in the open air. The principal of thèse théâtres was the Globe. The others, which were mostly closed play-rooms, lighted with lamps, were used at nîght, the most frequented being Blackfriars. The best actor of Lord Pembroke's troop was named Henslowe ; the best actor at Blackfriars was Burbage. The Globe was situated on the bank-side. This is known by a document at Sta- tioners' Hall, dated the 26th of November, 1607: "His Majesty's servants playing usually at the Globe, on the Bank Side." The scenery was simple. Two swords laid crosswise — sometimes two laths — signified a battle; a shirt over the coat signified a knight; a broom-handle draped with the petticoat of the players' hostess signified a palfrey caparisoned. A rich théâtre, which made its inventory in 1598, possessed "the limbs of Moors, a dragon, a big horse with his legs, a cage, a rock, four Turks' heads and that of old Mahomet, a wheel for the siège of London, and a heirs mouth." Another had "a sun, a target, the three plumes of the Prince of Wales, with the device Ich Dien, besides six devils, and the Pope on his mule." An actor besmeared with plaster WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, I5 and motionless, signified a wall; îf he spread his fingers, it meant that the wall had crevices. A man laden with a faggot, followed by a dog, and carrying a lantern, meant the moon; his lantern represented the moonshine. People hâve laughed at this mise en scène of moonlight, made famous by the * Midsummer Night's Dream/ without im- agining that there is in it a gloomy suggestion from Dante. (See * The Inferno/ canto xx.) The dressing-room of thèse théâtres, where the actors robed themselves pell-mell, was a corner separated from the stage by a rag of some kind stretched on a cord. The dressing-room at Blackfriars was shut off by an ancient pièce of tapestry which had belonged to one of the guilds,and represented an ironmonger's shop. Through the holes in this curtain, hanging in tatters, the public saw the actors rouge their cheeks with brick-dust, or make up their mustaches with a cork burned at a candle-end. From time to tîme, through an occasional opening of the curtain, you might see a face begrimed as a Moor, peeping to see if the time for going on the stage had arrîved, or the glabrous chin of an actor who was to play the part of a woman. "Glabri histriones," said Plautus. Thèse théâtres were frequented by no- blemen, scholars, soldiers, and sailors. There was acted Lord Buckhurst's tragedy, entitled ' Gor- boduc, or Ferrex and Porrex ; ' Lyly's * Mother Bombie/ in which the cheep-cheep of sparrows was heard ; * The Libertine,* an imitation of the * Con- vîvado de Piedra,' which was making the tour of Europe; 'Félix and Phîlomena,* a fashionable comedy performed for the first time at Greenwich l6 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. before *' Queen Bess ; " ' Promos and Cassandra/ a comedy dedicated by the author, George Whetstone, to William Fleetwood, recorder of London ; 'Tamer- lane ' and the * Jew of Malta/ by Christopher Mar- lowe ; farces and pièces by Robert Greene, George Peele, Thomas Lodge, and Thomas Kyd ; and lastly, mediaeval comédies. For just as France has her * TAvocat Pathelin/ so England has her ' Gammer Gurton's Needle/ While the actors gesticulated and ranted, the noblemen and officers — with theîr plumes and bands of gold lace, standing or squat- ting on the stage, turning their baoks, haughty and at their ease in the midst of the constrained actors — laughed, shouted, played at cards, threw them at each other's heads, or played at " post and pair ; " and below, in the darkness, on the pavement, among pots of béer and pipes, the " stînkards," or ground- iings, were dimly visible. It was by way of that very théâtre that Shakespeare entered upon the dramatic career. From being a tender of horses, he became a shepherd of men. 5. Such was the théâtre in London about the year 1580, under "the great Queen." It was not much less wretched, a century later, at Paris, un- der " the great King ; " and Molière, at his début, had, like Shakespeare, to make shift with rather misérable playhouses. There is in the archives of the ' Comédie Française ' an unpublished manu- script of four hundred pages, bound in parchment and tied with a band of white leather. It îs the diary of Lagrange, a comrade of Molière. La- grange thus describes the théâtre where Molière's Company played by order of Mr. Rataban, super- WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, IJ întendent of the Kîng's buildings : " Three rafters, the frames rotten and shored up, and half the room roofless and in ruîn." In another place, under date of Sunday, the I5th of March, 1671, he says : " The Company hâve resolved to make a large ceil- îng over the whole hall, which, up to the said date (i 5th) has not been covered, save by a large blue cloth suspended by cords." As for the lighting and heating of this hall, particularly on the occa- sion when such extraordinary sums were spent upon the performance of * Psyché,' which was by Molière and Corneille, we read : " Candies, thîrty francs ; janitor for wood, three francs." This was the style of playhouse which "the great King" placed at the disposai of Molière. Thèse bounties to literature did not impoverish Louis XIV. so much as to deprive him of the pleasure of giving, at one tîme, two hundred thousand livres to Lavar- din, and the same to D'Epernon ; two hundred thousand livres, besides the régiment of France, to the Count de Médavid ; four hundred thousand livres to the Bishop of Noyon, because this Bishop was a Clermont-Tonnerre, a family that had two patents of Count and Peer of France, one for Cler- mont and one for Tonnerre; five hundred thou- sand livres to the Duke of Vivonne, seven hundred thousand livres to the Duke of Quintin-Lorges, and eight hundred thousand livres to Monseigneur Clément of Bavaria, Prince-Bishop of Liège. Let us add that he gave a thousand livres pension to Molière. We find in Lagrangc's journal, in the month of April, 1663, this remark : *' About the same time M. de Molière received, as a great wit, 2 l8 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. a pension from the King, and has been placed on the civil list for the sum of a thousand livres." Later, when Molière was dead, and interred at St. Joseph, " chapel of ease to the parish of St. Eus- tache," the King pushed his patronage so far as to permit his tomb to be " raised a foot out of the ground." 6. Shakespeare, as we see, remained a long time on the threshold of theatrical life, — outside, rather, and in the street. At length he entered. He passed the door and got behind the scènes. He succeeded in becoming call-boy, vulgarly, a " bark- er." About 1 586 Shakespeare was *' barking " with Greene at Blackfriars. In 1587 he gained a step. In the pièce called ' The Giant Agrapardo, King of Nubia, worse than his late brother, Angulafer,' Shakespeare was intrusted with the task of carry- îng the turban to the giant. Then from supernu- merary he became actor, — thanks to Burbage, to whom, long after, by an interlineation in his will, he left thirty-sîx shillings to buy a gold ring. He was the friend of Condell and Hemynge, — his comrades while alive, his publishers after his death. He was handsome : he had a high forehead, his beard was brown, his manner was gentle, his mouth pleasant, his eye profound. He took delight in reading Montaigne, translated by Florio. He fre- quented the Apollo Tavern, where he would see and keep company with two frequenters of his théâtre, — Decker, author of * The GuU's Horn- book,' in which a chapter îs specially devoted to ** the way a man of fashion ought to behave at the play," and Dr. Simon Forman, who has left a WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, IÇ manuscrîpt journal containing reports of the first performance of *The Merchant of Venîce' and 'The Winter's Tale/^ He used to meet Sir Walter Raleigh at the Mermaid Club. Somewhere about that time Mathurin Régnier met Philippe de Béthune at La Pomme de Pin, The great lords and fine gentlemen of the day were rather prone to lend their names in order to start new taverns. At Paris the Vicomte de Montauban, who was a Créqui, had founded Le tripot des onze mille Diables. At Madrid the Duke of Médina Sidonia, the un- fortunate admirai of the Invincible Armada, had founded the Puno-en-rostro, and in London Sir Walter Raleigh had founded the Mermaid. There drunkenness and wit kept company. 7. In 1589, while James VI. of Scotland, look- ing to the throne of England, was paying his re- spects to Elizabeth, who, two years before, on the 8th of February, 1587, had beheaded Mary Stuart, mother of this James, Shakespeare composed his first drama, 'Pericles' [i6o8].2 In 1591, while the Catholic King was dreaming, after a scheme of the Marquis d'Astorga, of a second Armada, more lucky than the first, inasmuch as it was never ^ Inexact ; nothîng is known of the first représentation of * The Merchant of Venice.' Dr. Forman records représentations of but three plays,— 'Macbeth,' 'Cymbeline/ and *The Winter's Taie;* and it does not appear that thèse were first représentations. — Tr. * As the chronology of the plays hère given is very différent from that accepted at présent, the transi ator has inserted, in brackets, after the name of each play, the dates found in Dow- den's * Shakspere Primer.' To that excellent little book the un- initiated reader is referred for a gênerai correction of Hugo's bîography of Shakespeare, which is to some extent legendary or fabulous. — Tr. 20 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, launched, he composed * Henry VI.' In 1593, when the Jesuits obtaîned from the Pope express permission to paint "the pains and torments of hell" on the walls of "the chamber of méditation" of Clermont Collège, where they often shut up a poor youth who, the year after, became famous under the name of Jean Châtel, he composed * The Taming of the Shrew' [1594-97 ?]. In 1594, when, looking daggers at each other, and ready for battle, the King of Spain, the Queen of England, And even the King of France, ail three were saying " my good city of Paris," he continued and com- pleted * Henry VI.' [1591-92]. In 1595, while Clément VIII. at Rome was solemnly striking Henry IV. with his crosier over the backs of Car- dinals du Perron and d'Ossat, he wrote * Timon of Athens' [1607-8]. In 1596, the year when Eliz- abeth published an edict against the long points of bucklers, and when Philip II. drove from his présence a woman who had laughed while blowing her nose, he composed * Macbeth ' [1606]. In 1597, when this same Philip IL said to the Duke of Alva, " You deserve the axe," not because the Duke of Alva had put the Low Countries to fire and sword, but because he had entered the King's présence without being announced,^ he composed *Cymbeline' [1609] and 'Richard III.' [1593]. In 1598, when the Earl of Essex ravaged Ireland, wearing on his hat the glove of the Virgin Queen 1 The Duke of Alva who put the Netherlands to fire and sword died in 1582. His memory may therefore be relieved of the stain of having entered the King's présence unannounced in 1597 -Tr. fVILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 21 Elîzabeth, he composed * The Two Gentlemen of Verona' [iS92-93]» *KingJohn' [1595], 'Love's Labor's Lost' [1590], 'The Comedy of Errors * [1591], 'Airs Well that Ends Weir [1601-2], *A Midsummer Night's Dream ' [1593-94], and * The Merchant of Venice ' [1596]. In 1599, when the Privy Council, at her Majesty's request, deliberated on the proposai to put Dr. Hayward to the rack for having stolen some of the ideas of Tacitus, he composed * Romeo and Juliet * [two dates: 1591, 1596-97?]. In 1600, while the Em- peror Rudolph was waging war against his rebel brother, and sentencing his son, murderer of a woman, to be bled to death, he composed * As You Like If [1599], 'Henry IV/ [1597-98], 'Henry V/ [1599], and * Much Ado About No- thing' [1598]. In 1601, when Bacon published the eulogy on the exécution of the Earl of Essex,^ just as Leibnitz, eighty years afterwards, was to find out good reasons for the murder of Monaldes- chî (with this différence, however, that Monaldeschi was nothing to Leibnitz, and that Essex had been the benefactor of Bacon), he composed * Twelfth Night ; or, What you Wiir [1600-1]. In 1602, while, in obédience to the Pope, the King of France, styled by Cardinal-nephew Aldobrandinî " The Fox of Béarn,*' was counting his beads every day, reciting the litanies on Wednesday, and the 1 The author here confuses two works, — the * Déclaration of the Practices and Treasons of Essex' (1601), in which Bacon*s part was little more than that of amanuensis to the Government, and his *Apology in Certain Imputations concerning the Late Earl of Essex* (i6o4).--Tr. 22 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. rosary of the Virgin Mary on Saturday ; while fifteen cardinals, assisted by the heads of the Or- ders, were opening- the discussion on Molinism at Rome ; and while the Holy See, at the request of the Crown of Spain, was ** saving Christianity and the world " by the institution of the congrégation de Auxiliis, — he composed * Othello ' [1604]. In 1603, when the death of Elizabeth made Henry IV. say, " she was a virgin just as I am a Catholic," he composed *Hamlet' [1602]. In 1604, while Philip III. was losing his last footing in the Low Countries, he wrote *Julius Caesar' [1601] and * Measure for Measure' [1603]. In 1604, at the time when James I. of England, the former James VI. of Scotland, wrote against Bellarmin the * Tor- tura Torti/ and, faithless to Carr, began to smile upon Villiers, who was afterwards to honor him with the title of " Your Piggishness," he composed *Coriolanus' [1608]. In 1607, when the Univer- sity of York received the little Prince of Wales as doctor, accordingJ:o the account of Father St. Ro- muald, " with ail the cérémonies and the usual fur gowns," he wrote * King Lear ' [1605-6]. In 1609, while the magistracy of France, placing the scaf- fold at the disposition of the King, gave upon trust a carte blanche for the sentence of the Prince of Condé ** to such punishment as it might please his Majesty to order," Shakespeare composed * Troi- lus and Cressida ' [1603? revised 1607 ?]. In 1610, when Ravaillac assassinated Henry IV. by the dagger, and the French Parliament assassinated Ravaillac by the process of quartering his body, Shakespeare composed 'Antony and Cleopatra' WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, 2$ [1607]. In 161 1, while the Moors, driven out by Philip III., were crawling out of Spain in the pangs of death, he wrote *The Winter's Taie' [1610-11], 'Henry VIIL' [1612-13], and *The Tempest ' [1610]. 8. He used to write on loose scraps of paper, — lîke nearly ail poets, for that matter. Malherbe and Boileau are almost the only ones who hâve written on sheets folded and stîtched. Racan saîd to Mlle, de Gournay, " I hâve this morning seen M. de Mal- herbe sewing with coarse gray thread a fascicle of white paper, on which will soon appear some son- nets." Each of Shakespeare's dramas, composed according to the wants of his company, was in ail probability learned and rehearsed in haste by the actors from the original itself, as they had not time to copy it ; hence in his case, as in Molière's, the dîsmemberment and loss of manuscripts. There were few or no entry books in those almost itiné- rant théâtres; no coincidence in time between représentation and publication of the plays ; some- times not even a printed copy, the stage remaining the sole médium of publication. When the pièces by chance are printed, they bear titles which bewil- der us. The second part of * Henry VI.' is entitled *The First Part of the Contention between York and Lancaster/ The third part is called ' The True Tragedy of Richard, Duke of York.'^ Ail this enables us to understand why so much obscurity rests on the dates when Shakespeare composed his dramas, and why ît is difficult to fix them with 1 The plays thus entitled are older ones, of which ' Henry VI.' Parts II. and III. are recasts. — Tr. 24 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. précision. The dates which we hâve just given — hère brought together for the first time — are pretty nearly certain; notwithstanding some doubt still exists as to the years when were wrîtten, or even played, * Timon of Athens/ ' Cymbeline/ ' Julius Caesar/ * Antony and Cleopatra/ * Coriolanus/ and * Macbeth.' Hère and there we meet with barren years ; others there are of which the fertility seems excessive. It is, for instance, on a simple note by Mères, the author of *The Wit's Treasury,' that we are compelled to attribute to the year 1 598 the création of six pièces, — * The Two Gentlemen of Verona,' 'The Comedy of Errors/ *King John,' 'Midsummer Night's Dream,* *The Merchant of Venice,' and 'AU's Well that Ends Well/ which Mères calls * Love's Labour 's Won.' ^ The date of * Henry VI.' is fixed, for the First Part at least, by an allusion which Nash makes to thîs play in * Pierce Penniless.' The year 1604 is given as that of * Measure for Measure,* inasmuch as this pièce was played on St. Stephen's Day of that year, — a circum- stance of which Hemynge makes a spécial note ; and the year 161 1 for * Henry VIII.,' inasmuch as * Henry VIII.' was played at the time of the burning of the Globe Théâtre.^ Various circumstances — a disagreement with his company, a whim of the Lord Chamberlain — sometimes compelled Shakespeare 1 Francis Mères published in 1598 his 'Palladis Tamia: Wit's Treasury,* in which he enumerates not six but twâlve of Shake- gpcare*s plays. This mention of course merely proves the exist- ence of the plays in 1598 ; he does not state that any of them were produced in that year. — Tr. 2 This ** most celebrated théâtre the world has ever seen " was destroyed by fire on Tuesday, June 29, 1613. — Tr. WILLIAM SHAICESPEARE. 25 to change from one théâtre to another. ' The Taming of the Shrew ' was played for the first time in 1593, at Henslowe*s théâtre;^ * Twelfth Night' in 1601, at Middle Temple Hall ; * Othello ' iii 1602, at Harefield Castle.^ * King Lear ' was played at Whitehall during Ghristmas (1607) before James I.^ Burbage created the part of Lear. Lord South- ampton, recently set free from the Tower of Lon- don, was présent at this performance. This Lord Southampton was an old fréquenter of Blackfriars, and Shakespeare, în 1589,* had dedicated the poem of * Venus and Adonis ' to him. Adonis was the fashion at that time ; twenty-five years after Shake- speare, the Chevalier Marini wrote a poem on Adonis which he dedicated to Louis XIIL 9. In 1597 Shakespeare lost his son, of whom the only trace on earth is one line in the death- register of the parish of Stratford-on-Avon : " 1 597. August 17. Hamnet. Filius William Shakespeare^ On the 6th of September, 1601, the poet's father, John Shakespeare, died. He was now the head of hîs Company of actors. James L had given him in 1607 the management of Blackfriars, and afterward the privilège of the Globe. In 16 13, the Princess Elizabeth, daughter of James, and the Elector Pala- tine, King of Bohemia, whose statue may be seen în the ivy at the angle of a great tower at Heidel- berg, came to the Globe to see * The Tempest ' 1 This must hâve been the older play, * The Taming of a Shrew,* published in 1594. — Tr. a Halliwell-Phillipps (* Outlines,* p. 180) says that * Othello ' is first heard of in 1604. — Tr. » The true date is Dec. 26, 1606. — Tr. * * Venus and Adonis ' was published in 1593. — Tr. 26 . WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. performed. Thèse royal attendances did not save him from the censure of the Lord Chamberlain. A certain interdict weighed upon his pièces, the représentation of which was tolerated, and the printing now and then forbidden. In the second volume of the register at Stationers' Hall you may read to-day, on the margin of the title of three pièces, 'As You Like It/ * Henry V./ * Much Ado About Nothing/ the words ** 4 Augt. to be staiedJ* The motives for thèse interdictions escape us. Shakespeare was able, for instance, without arous- îng protest, to place upon the stage his former poaching adventure, and make of Sir Thomas Lucy a witling (Justice Shallow); to show the public Falstaff killing the buck and belaboring Shallow's people ; and to push the likeness so far as to give to Shallow the arms of Sir Thomas Lucy, — an Aristophanic pièce of audacity by a man who did not know Aristophanes. Falstaff, in Shakespeare's manuscripts, was written ** Falstaffe." In the mean- time he had amassed some wealth, as did MoHère later. Towards the end of the century he was rich enough for a certain Richard Quiney to ask, on the 8th of October,^ 1598, his assistance in a letter which bears the superscription, "To my loveing good ffrend and countreyman Mr. Wm. Shackespere delr thees." He refused the assistance, as it appears, and returned the letter, which was found afterwards among Fletcher's papers, and on the back of which this same Richard Quiney had written Histrio ! 1 The author has the date wrong. It should be the 25th of October. The letter is signed *' Ryc. Quyney^* which Hugo prints thus: '' RyC'Quineyr --1^ WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 2J Mimaf^ Shakespeare loved Stratford-on-Avon, where he was born, where his father had died, where hîs son was buried. He there bought or built a house, which he christened "New Place." We say, " bought or built a house ; " for he bought it according to Whiterill, and he built it according to Forbes, and on this point Forbes disputes with Whiterill.2 Thèse cavils of the learned about tri- lles are not worth being searched into, particularly when we see Father Hardouin, for instance, com- pletely upset a whole passage of Pliny by replacing nos pridem by non pridem, 10. Shakespeare went from time to time to pass some days at New Place. Half-way upon the short journey he encountered Oxford, and at Oxford the Crown Inn, and at the inn the hostess, a beautiful, intelligent créature, wife of the worthy înnkeeper, Davenant. In 1606 Mrs. Davenant was brought to bed of a son, whom they named Wil- liam; and in 1644 Sir William Davenant, created knight by Charles L, wrote to Rochester: "Know this, which does honor to my mother, — I am the son of Shakespeare ; " thus allying himself to Shake- speare in the same way that in our days M. Lucas- Montigny has claimed relationship with Mirabeau. 1 Halliwell-Phillipps, who gives at p. 144 of the ' Outlines ' a fac-similé of this, the only letter directly addressed to Shakespeare known to exist, is silent about this part of the anecdote. The let- ter was found in the Corporation archives at Strltford. — Tr. 3 Shakespeare bought the Great House, or New Place, in the spring of 1 597. For interesting particulars, seo*alliwell-PhilIipps*s 'Outlines,' pp. 116 £f., and R. G. White's 'Life and Genius of Shakespeare,' p. 121. An exhaustive account of it is given in the appendiz to the * Outlines,* pp. 447-479. — Tr. 28 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. Shakespeare had marrîed hîs two daughters, — Susanna to a doctor, Judith to a merchant. Su- sanna was élever, but Judith knew not how to read or Write, and signed her name with a cross. In 1613 it happened that Shakespeare, having corne to Stratford-on-Avon, had no further désire to return to London. Perhaps he was in difficul- ties. He had just been compelled to mortgage his house. The contract deed of this mortgage, dated the iith of March, 1613, and indorsed with Shakespeare's signature, was in the last cen- tury in the hands of an attorney, who gave it to Garrick, who lost it. Garrick lost likewise (it is Mlle. Violetti, his wife, who tells the story) Forbes's manuscript, with his letters in Latin. From 161 3 Shakespeare remained at his house at New Place, occupied with his garden, forgetting his plays, wholly devoted to his flowers. He planted in this garden of New Place the first mulberry-tree that was grown at Stratford, — just as Queen Eliza- beth wore, in 1561, the first silk stockings seeij in England. On the 25th of March, 1616, feeling ill, he made his will. His will, dictated by him, îs written on three pages; he signed each of them with a trembling hand. . On the first page he signed only his Christian name, " William ; " on the second, "Willm. Shaspr. ;" on the third, "William Shasp.^^ On the 23d of April he died. 1 This statement of the form of the poet*s signatures to his will is incorrect. The surname is signed in full in each case. Ail Shakespeare's authentic signatures are conveniently exhibited in fac-similé at the end of Charles Knight's * Biography of Shakspere.' In at least five of the six signatures the spelling is apparently Shakspere; in the other (the last upon the will) it is obscure. The WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 2g He had that day reached the exact âge of fifty-two years, having been born on the 23d of April, 1564. On that same day, 23d April, 1616, died Cervantes, a genius of like stature. When Shakespeare died, Milton was eight years, and Corneille ten years of âge ; Charles I. and Cromwell were two youths, the one of sixteen, the other of seventeen years. CHAPTER IV. Shakespeare's hTe was greatly embîttered. He lîved perpetually slighted. Posterity may read this to-day in his familiàr verses : — " Thence cornes it that my name receives a brand. And almost thence my nature is subdu*d To what it works in, like the dyer's hand : Pity me, then, ... Whilst, like a willing patient, I will drink Potions of eysel." Sonnei m. ** Your love and pity doth th' impression fill Which vulgar scandai stamp*d upon my brow." Sonnet 112- " Nor thou with public kindness honor me, Unless thou take that honor from thy name." Sonnet 36. " Or on my frailties why are frailer spies." Sonnet 12I- Shakespeare had permanently near him one envious person, Ben Jonson, an indiffèrent comic common spelling, Shakespeare, is based upon " the mode in which it was usually printed during the poet's life." — Tr. 30 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, poet, whose first steps he had aîded.^ Shake- speare was thirty-nine when Elizabeth died. This Queen had not paid much attention to him ; she managed to reign forty-four years without recog- nizing Shakespeare. None the less is she histori- cally styled " protectress of arts and letters," etc. The historians of the old school gave thèse certifi- cates to ail princes, whether they knew how to read or not. Shakespeare, persecuted as, at a later date, was Molière, sought, like Molière, to lean on the mas- ter. Shakespeare and Molière would in our days hâve had a loftier spirit. The master was Eliza- beth, " King Elizabeth," as the English say. Shake- speare glorified Elizabeth : he called her " the Virgin Star," " Star of the West, "and " Diana," — a name divine which pleased the Queen; but in vain. The Queen took no notice of it, — less sensitive to the praises in which Shakespeare called her " Diana" than to the insults of Scipio Gentilis, who, taking the pretensions of Elizabeth on the bad side, called her " Hécate," and applied to her the ancient triple curse, Mormo! Bombo! Gorgo! As for James I., whom Henry IV. called "Master James," he gave, as we hâve seen, the privilège of the Globe to Shakespeare, but he willingly forbade the publication of his pièces. Some contempora- ^ Only the last clause of the sentence is accurate. For the nature of the important service rendered by Shakespeare to Ben Jonson, see Halliwell-Phillipps's *Outlines/ pp. 148-150. That Ben Jonson was envions of Shakespeare is doubtless as untrue as that he was an " indiffèrent poet." ** I loved the man," he said aftcr Shakespeare's death, "and do honor his memory, on this Bide idolatry, as much as any." — Tr. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 31 ries, Dr. Simon Forman among others, so far took notice of Shakespeare as to make a note of the occupation of an evening passed at the perform- ance of * The Merchant of Venice ! ' ^ That was ail he knew of glory.^ Shakespeare, once dead, entered into oblivion. From 1640 to 1660 the Puritans abolished art and shut up the play-houses. The whole théâtre was shrouded as in a winding-sheet. With Charles II. the drama revived, without Shakespeare. The false taste of Louis XIV. had invaded England. Charles II. belonged rather to Versailles than London. He had as mistress a French girl, the Duchess of Portsmouth, and as an intimate friend the privy purse of the King of France. Clifford, hîs favorite, who never entered the Parliament- house without spitting, said : " It is better for my master to be viceroy under a great monarch like Louis XIV. than to be the slave of five hundred insolent English subjects.** Thèse were no longer the days of the Commonwealth, — the time when Cromwell took the title of *' Protector of England and France," and forced this same Louis XIV. to accept the title of " King of the French." 1 See note p. 19. 2 Apart from the commendatory verses prefixed to the folio of 1623, Halliwell-Phillipps (*Outlines,' pp. 569-582) cites no less than eighteen contemporary références by name to the great dram- atist, substantially ail of them eulogistic. It would be strange indeed if that pre-eminently dramatic âge should hâve left the discovery of Shakespeare 's genius as a playwright to be made in an âge of dramatic decay. Considering that no one took pains to préserve testiraony of any kind with référence to Shakespeare, the évidence of his great popularity — not to say pre-eminence — in his own time is in truth remarkably abundant. — Tr. 32 WILLÎÀM 3ÏIAJCËSPEARÊ, Under this restoration of the Stuarts, Shake* speare's éclipse became complète. He was so thoroughly dead that Davenant, his putative son, recomposed his pièces. There was no longer any ' Macbeth ' but the ' Macbeth ' of Davenant. Dry- den speaks of Shakespeare on one occasion in order to say that he is " out of date."^ Lord Shaftesbury calls'him " a wit out of fashîon." Dry- den and Shaftesbury were two oracles. Dryden, a converted Catholic, had two sons, ushers in the chamber of Clément XI. ; he made tragédies wor- thy of being put into Latin verse, as Atterbury's hexameters prove, and he was the servant of that James II. who, before he became king on his own ac- count, had asked of his brother, Charles IL, "Why don't you hang Milton ? *' The Earl of Shaftes- bury, a friend of Locke, was the man who wrote an * Essay on Sprightliness in Important Conversa- tions,' and who, by the manner in which Chancellor Hyde helped his daughter to the wing of a chicken, divined that she was secretly married to the Duke of York. Thèse two men having condemned Shakespeare, \the oracle had spoken. England, a country more iobedient to conventional opinion than is generally 1 Dryden spoke of Shakespeare often, sometimes critically, but always with the highest respect. It was he who wrote in the pro- logue to * The Tempest : ' — " But Shakespeare's magie could not copied be ; Within that cirde none durst walk but he.*' And in the dedication to * The Rival Ladies,' he refers to Shake- speare as one " who, with some errors not to be avoided in that âge, had undoubtedly a larger soûl of poesy than ever any of our nation." — Ta. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, 33 belîeved, forgot Shakespeare. Some purchaser pulled down his house, New Place. A Rev. Dr. Cartrell eut down and burned his mulberry-tree. At the beginning of the eighteenth century the éclipse^ was total. In 1707, a certain Nahum Tate published a * King Lear/ informîng his readers " that he had borrowed the idea of ît from a play whîch he had read by chance, the work of some nameless author." This " nameless author " was Shakespeare.^ 1 Victor Hugo's smoked glass very much darkens the " éclipse " of Shakespeare at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Gé- rard Langbaine, in his * Account of the English Dramatick Poets ' (Oxford, 1691), says: "I esteem his plays beyond any that hâve ever been published in our language." Again : " I should think I were guilty of an injury beyond pardon to his memory, should I so far disparage it as to bring his wit in compétition with any in our âge.*' That Langbaine was not alone in thinking thus, there is plenty of évidence. See foot-note, p. 32. — Tr. 2 The statement that Tate styled the original * Lear * the work of " some nameless author " is piquant, but untrue. His Dedica- tion names Shakespeare repeatedly, and ** in a tone of révérence." He speaks of his own work as a " revival " of Shakespeare's, and his Epilogue concludes with, — " This Play*8 Reviver humbly do's admît Your abs'lute Pow'r to damn his part of it : But still so many Master-Touches shine Of that vast Hand that first laid this Design That in great Shakespeat's right, He *s bold to say. If you like nothing you hâve seen this Day, The Play your Judgment damns, not you the Play.*' It may be added that Victor Hugo advances by about a quarter of a century the date of Tate's " revival " of * Lear,* which had been before the public seven or eîght years when Langbaine wrote the remarks quoted in the preceding note. The reader may be willing to be reminded that this ** certain " Nahum Tate succeeded Shadwell (Dryden's successor) as poet lauréate of England. — Tr. 34 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. CHAPTER V. In 1728 Voltaire imported from England to France the name of Will Shakespeare; only, in- stead of Will, he pronounced it Gilles, Jeering began in France, and oblivion continued în England. What the Irishman Nahum Tate had done for ' King Lear,' others did for other pièces. * AU 's Well that Ends Well ' had successîvely two " arrangers/' Pilon for the Haymarket, and Kemble for Drury Lane. Shakespeare existed no longer, and counted no longer. * Much Ado About Nothing ' served likewise as a rough draft twice, — for Davenant in 1673; for James Miller in 1737. * Cymbeline ' was recast four times, — under James IL, at the Théâtre Royal, by Thomas Dursey; in 1695 ^y Charles Marsh; in 1759 by W. Hawkins; în 1761 by Garrick. * Coriolanus ' was recast four times, — in 1682, for the Théâtre Royal, by Tate; în 1720, for Drury Lane, by John Dennis; in ï7SS> for Covent Garden, by Thomas Sheridan; în 1801, for Drury Lane, by Kemble. 'Timon of Athens ' was recast four times, — at the Duke*s Théâtre, in 1678, by Shadwell; in 1768, at the théâtre of Richmond Green, by James Love ; in 1771, at Drury Lane, by Cumberland; in 1786, at Covent Garden, by Hull. In the eîghteenth century the persistent raillery of Voltaire finally produced in England a cer- tain revival of interest. Garrick, while correcting WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 35 Shakespeare, played hîm, and acknowledged that it was Shakespeare that he played. They reprinted him at Glasgow. An imbécile, Malone, made com- mentaries on his plays, and, as a logical séquence, whitewashed his tomb. There was on this tomb a little bust, of a doubtful resemblance, and indiffèr- ent as a work of art, but vénérable from the fact that it was contefnporaneous with Shakespeare. It is after this bust that ail the portraits of Shake- speare hâve been made that we now see. The bust was whitewashed. Malone, critic and white- washer of Shakespeare, spread a coat of plaster over his face, and of stupid nonsense over his work. BOOK IL MEX or GEXIU5. CHAPTER L HIGH Art, using tliis word in its afasolote sensé» îs the région of Eqnals. Beforc goîng farther, let os fix the vaine of thîs expression, "Art,** which often occnrs in thîs boolc We speak of Art as we speak of Nature. Hère are two terms of almost indeterminate meaning; to pronounce the one or the other of thèse words — Nature, Art — îs to make a conjuration, to call forth the idéal from the deeps, to draw aside one of the two great curtains of the divine création. God manîfests himself to us in the first degree through the lîfe of the unîverse, and in the second through the thought of man. The second mani- festation îs not less holy than the first. The first in namcd Nature, the second îs named Art. Hence thîs rcality : the poet îs a prîest Thcrc îs hcre below a pontiflF, — ît îs genîus. Saccrdos Magnus, Art is the second branch of Nature. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 37 Art is as natural as Nature. By the word GOD — let us fix the sensé of thîs Word also — we mean the Living Infinité. The latent Ego of the visible Infinité, that is God. God îs the invis ible mad e évident . _ The world concentrated. is God. God expanded^ Js«thfi...^orld. We, who are speaking, believe in nothing out of God. That being said, let us proceed. God créâtes Art by man, havin ^ for a tnni tVi^ Vtnm^^n l'nf^ll^f The great Workman has made this tool for himself ; he has no other. Forbes, in the curions little work perused by Warburton and lost by Garrick, affîrms that Shake- speare devoted himself to the practice of magie, that magie was in his family, and that what little good there was in his pièces was dictated to hîm by a familiar spirit. Let us say concerning this — for we must not draw back from any question that may arise — that it has been a strange error of ail âges to désire to give the human intellect assistance from without Antrum adjuvat vatem. The work ap- pearing superhuman, people wish to exhibit the intervention of the extra-human : in antîquity, the tripod ; in our days, the table. The table is nothing but the tripod come again. To accept in a literal sensé the démon that Socrates talks of, the bush of Moses, the nymph of Numa, the spirit of Plotinus, and Mahomet's dove, is to be the victim of a metaphon 38 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. On the other hand, the table, turnîng or talkîng, has been very much laughed at. To speak plainly, this raillery is out of place. To replace inquîry by mockery is convenîent, but not very scîentific. For our part, we think that the strict duty of Science is to test ail phenomena. Science is ig- norant, and has no right to laugh : a savant who laughs at the possible, is very near being an idiot. The unexpected ought always to be expected by Science. Her duty is to stop it in its course and search ît, rejecting the chimerical, establishing the real. Science has but the right to put a visa on facts; she should verify and distinguish. AU hu- màn knowledge is but picking and cuUing. The circumstance that the false is mingled with the true, furnishes no excuse for rejecting the whole mass. When was the tare an excuse for refusing the corn? Hoe out the weed error, but reap the fact, and place it beside others. Science is the sheaf of facts. The mission of Science is to study and sound everything. AU of us, according to our degree, are the creditors of investigation ; we are its debt- ors also. It is due to us, and we owe it to others. To évade a phenomenon, to refuse to pay it that attention to which it has a right, to bow it out, to show it the door, to turn our back on it laughing, is to make truth a bankrupt, and to leave the signature of Science to be protested. The phe- nomenon of the tripod of old, and of the table of to-day, is entitled, like anything else, to inves- tigation. Psychic science will gain by it, without doubt. Let us add, that to abandon phenomena WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 39 to credulity, îs to commît treason agaînst hum an reason. Homer affirms that the trîpods of Delphi walked of their own accord; and he explains the fact (bock xviii. of the *Iliad') by saying that Vulcan forged invisible wheels for them. The explanation does not much simplify the phenomenon. Plato relates that the statues of Daedalus gesticulated in the darkness, had wills of their own, and resisted their master, and that he was obliged to tie them up, so that they might not walk off. Strange dogs at the end of a chain ! Fléchier mentions, at page 52 of his *History of Theodosius/ — referring to the great conspiracy of the magicians of the fourth century against the Emperor, — a tipping table, of which we shall perhaps speak elsewhere, in order to say what Fléchier did not say, and seemed not to know. This table was covered wîth a round plating of several metals, ex diversis metallicis materiis fabrefacta, like the copper and zinc plates employed at présent in biological investigation. So it appears that this phenomenon, always re- jected and always reappearîng, is not an affair of yesterday. Besides, whatever credulity has saîd or thought about it, this phenomenon of the tripods and tables is without any connection with the inspiration ôf the poets, — an inspiration entirely direct. This is the point at which we hâve been aîming. The sibyl has a tripod, the poet none; the poet is himself a tripod, the tripod of divinity îtself. God has not made this marvellous distillery of thought, — the brain of man, — in order to make no use of 40 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, ît The man of genius has need of no apparatus but his brain ; through it his every thought must pass. Thought ascends, and buds from the brain, as the fruit from the root Thought is the résul- tant of man; the root plunges into the earth, the brain into God, — that is to say, into the Infinité. Those who imagine (there are such, witness Forbes) that a poem like * Le Médecin de son Honneur' or 'King Lear' can be dictated by a tripod or a table, err in a strange fashion; thèse Works are the works of man. God has no need to make a pièce of wood aid Shakespeare or Calderon. Then let us set aside the tripod. Poetry is the poet's own. Let us be respectful before the possi- ble, of which no one knows the limit. Let us be attentive and serions before the extra-human, out of which we come, and which awaits us ; but let us not dégrade the great workers of the world by hypothèses of a mysterious assistance which is not necessary; let us leave to the brain that which belongs to it, and agrée that the productions of genius are a superhuman ofTspring of man. CHAPTER II. Suprême Art is the région of Equals. There is no primacy among masterpieces. Like water, which heated to a hundred degrees will bear no increase of température, .human thought WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 41 attaîns in certain men îts maximum intensîty. ^schylus, Job, Phidias, Isaiah, Saint Paul, Juve- nal, Dante, Michael Angelo, Rabelais, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Rembrandt, Beethoven, with some others, rise to the hundredth degree of genius. The human mind has a summit, — the idéal ; to this summit God descends, man rises. In each âge three or four men of genius under- take the ascent. From below, the world*s eyes foUow them. Thèse men go up the mountain, enter into the clouds, disappear, reappear. People watch them, mark them. They skirt précipices; a false step would not displease certain of the lookers-on. They daringly pursue their road. See them aloft, already afar ; they are no longer any- thing but black specks. *' How small they are ! " says the crowd. They are giants. On they go. The road is rugged, the scarped cliff resists them. At each step a wall, at each step a pitfall. As they rise, the cold increases. They must make 'their ladder, eut the ice, and walk on it, converting obstacles into a stairway. Every storm is raging. Nevertheless, thèse madmen make their way. The air becomes difficult to breathe, the abyss widens around them. Some fall: they hâve done well. Others stop, and retrace their steps; there is sad weariness. Some intrepid ones continue ; the elect persévère. The dreadful declivity crumbles be- neath them and seeks to sweep them away ; glory is treacherous. Eagles eye them ; lightnings blunt their bolts upon them; the hurricane is furious. No matter, they persist, they press upward. He who reaches the summit is thy equal, O Homer ! 42 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. Repeat the names we hâve mentioned, and those whîch we might hâve added. To choose between thèse men is impossible. There is no method for striking the balance between Rembrandt and Mîchael Angelo. Confining ourselves solely to the authors and poets, let us examine them one after the other. Which is the greatest ? Every one. I. One, Homer, is the huge poet-child. The world is born, Homer sings : he is the bird of this dawn. Homer has the holy candor of morning. The shadow is almost unknown to him. Chaos, heaven, earth, Geo and Ceto, Jove god of gods, Agamemnon king of kings, peoples, flocks from the beginning, temples, towns, battles, harvests, the océan ; Diomedes fighting, Ulysses wandering ; the meanderîngs of a ship seeking its home ; the Cyclops, the Pygmies ; a map of the world with a crown of gods upon Olympus, and hère and there a glimpse of Erebus through furnace-mouths ; priests, virgins, mothers, little children frightened by the plumes, the unforgetting dog, great words which fall from gray-beards, loving friendships, the passions and the hydras, Vulcan for the laugh of the gods, Thersites for the laugh of men ; the two aspects of married life summed up for the benefit of the centuries in Helen and in Pénélope; the Styx, Destiny, the heel of Achilles, without which Destiny would be vanquished by the Styx ; mon- sters, heroes, men, a thousand perspectives glimps- ing in the haze of the antique world, — this is Homer. Troy coveted, Ithaca longed for. Homer is war and travel, — the two first methods for the meeting of WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 43 mankînd. The camp attacks the fortress, the shîp attacks the unknown by penetrating it ; around war every passion ; around travel every kind of adven- ture; two gigantic groups: the first, bloody, is called the * Iliad/ the second, luminous, is called the * Odyssey/ Homer makes men preternatu- rally big ; they hurl at each other masses of rock which twelve yoke of oxen could not move ; the gods hardly care to hâve to deal with them. Min- erva takes Achilles by the hair; he turns around in anger: "What wouldst thou with me, goddess?" There is, however, no monotony in thèse puissant figures. Thèse giants are graduated. After eàch hero, Homer breaks the mould. Ajax son of Oïleus is less high in stature than Ajax son of Telamon. Homer is one of the men of genius who solve that fine problem of art, — the finest of ail, perhaps, — truly to depict humanity by the en- largement of man: that is, to generate the real in the idéal. Fable and history, hypothesis and tradition, the chimera and knowledge, make up Homer. He is fathomless, and he is cheerful. Ail the depth of ancient days moves, radiant and luminous, in the vast azuré of his mind. Lycur- gus, that peevish sage, half a Solon and half a Draco, was conquered by Homer. He turned out of the way, while travelling, to go and read, at the house of Cleophilus, Homer's poems, placed there in remembrance of the hospitality that Homer, ît is said, had formerly received in that house. Homer, to the Greeks, was a god ; he had priests, the Homerîdes. Alcîbiades gave a rhetorîcian a cuff for boasting that he had ncver read Homer. 44 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. The divînity of Homer has survîved Paganism. Mîchael Angelo said, " When I read Homer, I look at myself to see if I am not twenty feet in height." Tradition will hâve it that the first verse of the * Ilîad ' is a verse of Orpheus ; and thîs tradition, doubling Homer by Orpheus, increased in Greece the religion of Homer. The shield of Achilles, book xviii. of the * Iliad/ was explained in the temples by Danco, daughter of Pythagoras. Homer, like the sun, has planets. Virgil who writes the ' -^neid,' Lucan who writes the * Pharsa- lia,' Tasso who writes the 'Jérusalem,' Arîosto with his 'Roland,' Miltonwith 'Paradise Lost,' Camoëns with the ' Lusiad,' Klopstock with the ' Messiah,' Voltaire with the * Henriade,* ail gravitate about Homer, and, sending back to their own moons his light reflected at différent angles, move at un- equal distances within his boundless orbit. Such is Homer ; such is the beginning of the epic. 2. Another, Job, begins the drama. This em- bryo is a colossus. Job begins the drama, now forty centuries ago, by placing Jehovah and Satan in présence of each other ; the evil défies the good, and behold ! the action is begun. The scène is laid upon the earth, and man is the field of battle ; the plagues are the actors. One of the wildest grand- eurs of this poem is, that in ît the sun is baleful. The sun is in Job as in Homer ; but it is no longer the dawn, it is hîgh noon. The mournful oppres- sion of the brazen ray, falling perpendicularly on the désert, pervades the poem, which is heated to a whîte heat. Job sweats on his dunghill. The shadow of Job is small and black, and hidden undcr WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 45 hîm, as the snake under the rock. Tropical Aies buzz on hîs sores. Job bas above his head the frîghtful Arabian sun — a breeder of monsters, an intensifier of plagues, which changes the cat înto the tîger, the lizard into the crocodile, the pig into the rhinocéros, the snake into the boa, the nettle înto the cactus, the wind into the sîmoom, the miasma înto the pestilence. Job is anterior to Moses. Afar in the âges, by the side of Abraham the Hebrew patriarch, there is Job the Arabian patriarch. Before being tried, he had been happy : " thîs man was the greatest of ail the men of the East," says his poem. This was the laborer-king: he exercised the immense priesthood of solitude ; he sacrificed and sanctified. Toward evening he gave the earth the blessing, the berakah. He was learned; he was acquainted with rhythm; his poem, of which the Arabian text is lost, was written in verse : this, at least, is certain from verse 3 of chap. iii. to the end. He was good; he did not meet a poor child without throwing him the small coin kesitha ; he was " the foot of the lame, and the eye of the blind." It is from this that he has fallen : fallen, he becomes gigantic. The whole poem of Job is the development of this îdea, — the greatness that may be found at the bottom of the pit Job is more majestic when unfortunate than when prospér- ons ; his leprosy is a robe of purple. His misery terrifies those who are there ; they speak not to him untîl after a silence of seven days and seven nights. Hîs lamentation is marked by a certain tranquîl and gloomy magianîsm. While crushing the vermin on hîs ulcers, he apostrophîzes the stars. He addresses 46 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. Orion, the Hyades, — which he names the Pléi- ades, — and *' the chambers of the south.*' He says, " God setteth an end to darkness." He calls the diamonds which are hidden, "the stones of darkness." He mingles with his own distress the misfortune of others, and has tragic words that freeze, — " the widow is empty." ^ He smiles also, and is then still more, terrible. He has around hiin Eliphaz, Bildad, Zophar, three implacable types of the friendly busybody, of whom he says, " You play on me as on a tambourine.*' His language, submissive toward God, is bitter toward kings: " kings and counsellors of the earth, which built desolate places for themselves," — leaving our wit to find out whether he speaks of their tomb or of their kingdom. Tacitus says, solitudinem faciunt As to Jehovah, Job adores him; and under the furious scourging of the plagues, ail his résistance îs confined to asking of God : " How long wilt thou not départ from me, nor let me alone till I swallow down my spittle?" That dates from fourthousand years ago. At the same hour, perhaps, when the enigmatical astronomer of Denderah carves in the granité his mysterious zodiac. Job engraves his on human thought; and his zodiac is not made of stars, but of miseries. This zodiac turns yet above our heads. We hâve of Job only the Hebrew ver- sion, attributed to Moses. The thought of such a poet, foUowed by such a translator, is impressive : the man of the dunghill translated by the man of Sinai ! Job is in reality a priest and a seer. Job 1 Is this an error ? Job xxii. 9 reads, " Thou hast sent widows away empty." And where is the next quotation f ound ? — Tr. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 47 extracts from his drama a dogma ; he suffers, and draws an inference. Now, to suffer and draw an inference is to teach ; sorrow leads logically to God. Job teaches; having touched the summit of the drama, he stirs the depths of phîlosophy. He fîrst shows that sublime madness of wisdom which, two thousand years later, in résignation making itself a sacrifice, will be the foolishness of the cross — stultitiam crticis, The dunghill of Job, transfigured, will become the Calvary of Jésus. 3. Another, ^Eschylus, enlightened by the un- conscious divination of genius, without suspecting that he has behind him, in the East, the résignation of Job, complètes it, unwittingly, by the revolt of Prometheus ; so that the lesson may be complète, and that the human race, to whom Job has taught but duty, shall feel in Prometheus the dawn of right. There is something ghastly in ^Eschylus from one end to the other ; there is a vague out- line of an extraordinary Médusa behind the figures în the foreground. ^schylus is splendid and for- midable ; as^though you saw a frowning brow above the sun. He has two Gains, Eteocles and Polyni- ces ; Genesis has but one. His troop of Oceanides comes and goes under a dark sky, like a flock of driven birds. ^Eschylus has none of the recognîzed proportions. He is shaggy, abrupt, excessive, un- susceptible of softened contour, almost savage, with a grâce ail his own like that of the flowers of wild nooks, less haunted by the nymphs than by the furies, siding with the Titans, among the goddesses choosing the austère and greeting the Gorgons with a sinister smile, like Othryx and Briareus a 48 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, son of the soil, and ready to scale the skies anew against the upstart Jupiter. iEschylus is ancient mystery made man ; something like a Pagan prophet. His work, if we had it ail, would be a kind of Greek Bible. Poet hundred-handed, having an Orestes more fatal than Ulysses and a Thebes grander than Troy, hard as rock, tumultuous like the foam, full of steeps, torrents, and précipices, and such a giant that at times one might take him for a mountain. Corning later than the * Iliad,' he has the air of an elder brother of Homer. 4. Another, Isaiah, seems placed above human- îty, and resembles a rumbling of continuai thun- der. He is the great reproacher. His style, a kind of nocturnal cloud, is lighted up with images which suddenly empurple ail the depths of his obscure thought, and make us exclaim, " It light- ens ! " Isaiah engages in battle, hand to hand, with the evil which, in civilization, makes its ap- pearance before the good. He cries " Silence ! " at the noise of chariots, of festivals, of triumphs. The foam of his prophecy falls even on Nature ; he gives Babylon over to the moles and bats, Nin- eveh to the briers, Tyre to ashes, Jérusalem to night; he fixes a date for oppressors, warns the powers of their approaching end, assigns a day against idols, against high citadels, against the fleets of Tarsus, against ail the cedars of Lebanon, and against ail the oaks of Bashan. He stands upon the threshold of civilization, and he refuses to enter. He is a kind of mouthpiece of the désert speakîng to the multitudes, and demanding, in the name of the sands, the brambles, and the winds, WILLIAM SHAlCESPEARÉ. 4^ the sites of the cities. And thîs upon the score of justice : because the tyrant and the slave, that is to say, pride and shame, exist wherever there are walled enclosures; because evil is there in- carnate in man; because in solitude there is but the beast, while in the city there is the monster. Those things with which Isaiah reproàched his'time, — idolatry, debauchery, war, prostitution, ignor- ance, — still exist. Isaiah is the undying contem- porary of the vices that make themselves servants, and of the crimes that make themselves kings. 5. Another, Ezekiel, is the wild soothsayer: a genius of the cavern, whose thought is best ex- pressed by a beast-like growling. But listen. This savage makes a prophecy to the world, — the pro- phecy of progress. Nothing more astonishing. Ah ! Isaiah overthrows ? Very well ! Ezekiel will reconstruct. Isaiah refuses civilization ; Ezekiel accepts, but transforms it. Nature and humanity blend together in that softened howl which Ezekiel utters. The conception of duty is in Job ; in iEs- chylus, the conception of right. Ezekiel întro- duces the résultant third conception, — the human race ameliorated, the future more and more eman- cîpated. It is man's consolation that the future îs to be a sunrise instead of a sunset. Time pré- sents Works for time to come; work, then, and hope ! Such is EzekieFs cry. Ezekiel is in Chal- daea, and from Chaldaea he sees distinctly Judaea, just as from oppression one may see liberty. He déclares peace as others déclare war. He proph- esîes harmony, goodness, gentleness, union, the blendîng of races, love. Notwithstanding, he is 4 50 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, terrible. He îs the fierce benefactor, the univer- sal, beneficent grumbler at the human race. He scolds, he almost gnashes his teeth, and people fear and hâte him. The men about are thorns to him. " I live among the briers/* he says. He condemns himself to be a symbol, and makes of his person, become hideous, a sign of human misery and popular dégradation. He is a kind of voluntary Job. In his town, in his house, he causes himself to be bound with cords, and remains mute : behold the slave ! In the public place he eats fîlth : behold the courtier ! This causes Vol- taire*s laughter to burst forth, and our sobs. Ah, Ezekiel, so far does thy dévotion go ! Thou ren- derest shame visible by horror ; thou compellest ignominy to avert the head when recognizing her- self in ordure ; thou showest that to accept a man as master is to eat filth ; thou causest a shudder to the sycophants who foUow the prince, by putting înto thy stomach what they put into their soûls; tthou preachest deliverance by vomiting. Accept our vénération ! This man, this being, this figure, this swine-prophet, is sublime. And the transfigu- ration that he announces, he proves. How ? By transfiguring himself. From this horrible and de- filed mouth there issues splendid poetry. Never has grander language been spoken, never more extraordinary. ** I saw visions of God. A whirl- wind came out of the North, and a great cloud, and a fire infolding itself I saw a chariot, and a likeness of four living créatures. Above the living créatures and the chariot was a space like a ter- rible crystal. The wheels of the chariot were WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, 51 made of eyes, and so high that they were dread- ful. The noise of the wings of the four angels was as the voice of the Almighty, and when they stood they let down their wings. And I saw a likeness which was as fire, and which put forth a hand. And a voice said, * The kings and the judges hâve in their soûls gods of dung. I will take the stony heart out of their flesh, and I wilL give them an heart of flesh.* ... I came to them that dwelt by the river of Chebar, and I remained there astonished among them seven days." And again : " There was a plain and dry bones, and I said, * Bones, rise up ; * and when I beheld, lo ! the sinews and the flesh came up upon them, and the skin covered them above; but there was no breath in them. And I cried, ' Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon thèse slaîn that they may live ! * The spirit came. The breath came into them, and they lived, and stood up upon their feet, an exceeding great army. Then the voice said, * Ye shall be one nation, ye shall hâve no king or judge but me ; and I will be the God who has one people, and ye shall be the people who hâve one God.' '* Is not everything there? Search for a higher formula, you will not find it : a free man under a sovereign God. This vision- ary eater of filth is a resuscitator. Ezekiel has offal on his lips, and the sun in his eyes. Among the Jews the reading of Ezekiel was dreaded, and was not permitted before the âge of thirty years. The rabbis, disturbed, put a seal upon this poet. People could not call him an impostor: his pro- phétie fury was incontestable; he had evidently 52 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, seen what he related : thence his authority. Hîs very enigmas made him an oracle. They could not tell who were meant by those women sitting toward the North weeping for Tammuz ; ^ impos- sible to divine what was the hashmal, this métal which he pictured as in fusion in the furnace of the dream.^ But nothing was more clear than his vision of Progress. Ezekiel saw the quadruple man, — man, ox, lion, and eagle; that is to say, the master of thought, the master of the fîeld, the master of the désert, the master of the air. No- thing is forgotten; it is the entire future, from Arîstotle to Christopher Columbus, from Triptole- mus to Montgolfier. Later on, the Gospel also will become quadruple in the four evangelists, making Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John subser- vient to man, the ox, the lion, and the eagle, and, remarkable fact, to symbolize progress it will take the four faces of Ezekiel. Furthermore, Ezekiel, like Christ, calls himself the " Son of Man/* Jésus often in his parables invokes and cites Eze- kiel ; and this kind of first Messiah makes précé- dents for the second. There are in Ezekiel three constructions, — man, in whom he places progress ; the temple, where he puts a light that he calls "glory ; " the city, where he places God. He cries 1 Ezekiel viii. 14. This " enigma " was not such to Milton, who sings of Zion's daughters, — ** Whose wanton passions in the sacred porch Ezekiel saw, when, by the vision led, His eye surveyed the dark idolâtries Of alienated Judah." Paradise Losty i. 446 seq, * The mysterious word kaskmal is rendered by " amber *' in our common version (Ezekiel i. 4)« — Ta. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. $3 to fie temple, — "No prîests hère, neîther they, nor theîr kings, nor the carcases of their kings" (xliii. 7).^ One cannot help thinking that this Ezekiel, a species of Biblical démagogue, would help *93 in the terrible sweeping of St. Denis. As for the city built by him, he mutters above it this mysterious name, Jehovah Schammah, which sig- nifies " the Eternal is there." Then, standing silent in the darkness, he shows men, on the far horizon, an ever-widening space of azuré sky. 6. Another, Lucretius, is that vast, obscure thîng, AU. Jupiter is in Homer; Jehovah is in Job; in Lucretius, Pan appears. Such is Pan's greatness, that he has under him Destiny, which is above Ju- piter. Lucretius has travelled and he has mused, and musing is another form of travel. He has been at Athens; he has been in the haunts of philosophers ; he has studied Greece and divined India. Democritus has set him to thinking about the molécule, and Anaximander about space. His dreams hâve become doctrine. Nothing is known of the incidents of his life. Like Pythagoras, he has frequented the two mysterious schools of the Euphrates, Neharda and Pombeditha, and he may hâve met there the Jewish doctors. He has deci- phered the papyri of Sepphoris, which in his time was not yet transformed into Diocaesarea ; he has lived with the pearl-fishers of the Isle of Tylos. We find in the Apocrypha traces of a strange an- cient itinerary, recommended, according to some, 1 The curious reader will discover that the citations from Eze- kiel are either paraphrased or garbled, or both. Pedantic exact- itude is not one of Hugo's faults. — Tr. 54 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. to philosophers by Empedocles, the magîcian of Agrigentum, and, according to others, to the rabbis by the high-priest Eleazer, who corre- sponded with Ptolemy Philadelphus. This itin- erary would hâve served at a later time as a model for the journeyings of the Apostles. The traveller who followed this itinerary traversed the five satrapies of the country of the Philistines; visited the people who charm serpents and suck poisonous sores, — the Psylli ; drank of the torrent Bosor, which marks the frontier of Arabia Déserta; then touched and handled the bronze collar of Andromeda, still sealed to the rock of Joppa; Baalbec in Cœle-Syria; Apamea on the Orontes, where Nicanor fed his éléphants; the harbor of Ezion-geber, where rode the vessels of Ophir, laden with gold; Segher, which produced white incense, preferred to that of Hadramauth; the two Syrtes; Smaragdus, the mountain of emer- ald ; the Nasamones, who pillaged the ship- wrecked; the black nation, Agyzimba; Adribe, the city of crocodiles ; Cynopolis, the city of dogs; the wonderful cities of Comagena, Claudia, and Barsalium; perhaps even Tadmor, the city of Solomon : such were the stages of this almost fabulous pilgrimage of the thinkers. Did Lucre- tius make this pilgrimage? One cannot tell. His numerous travels are beyond doubt. He has seen so many men that at the last to his eye they ail seem indistinguishably blended, and hâve become to him a spectral multitude. He is arrived at that excess of simplification of the universe which almost causes it to disappear. He has WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, 55 sounded until he feels the plummet float. He has questioned the vague spectres of Byblos; he has conversed with the tree-trunk. eut from Cithaeron, which represents Juno Thespia. Per- haps he has spoken in the reeds to Oannes, the man-fish of Chaldaea, who had two heads, — at the top, the head of a man, below, the head of a hydra, — and who, drînking up chaos by his lower guUet, revomîted it on the earth through his upper mouth în the form of dreadful knowledge. Isaiah stands next to the archangels, Lucretius to the spectres. Lucretius twists the ancient veil of Isis, steeped in the waters of darkness, and wrings from it some- times in torrents, sometimes drop by drop, a som- bre poesy. The boundiess is in Lucretius. At times there passes a powerful spondaic verse, almost monstrous, and full of shadow : — " Circum se froliis ac frondibus involventes." Hère and there a vast image of pairing is dimly outlined in the forest : — " Tune Venus in sylvis jungebat corpora amantum ; " and the forest is Nature. Thèse verses are impos- sible with Virgil. Lucretius turns his back on hu- manity, and fixes his gaze upon the enigma. His searching spirit is placed between that reality, the atom, and that impossibility, the vacuum : by turns attracted by thèse two précipices, he is religions when he contemplâtes the atom, sceptical when he perceives the void ; thence his two aspects, equally profound, of déniai and of affirmation. One day this traveller commits suicide. This is his last de- parture. He puts himself en route for Death. He 56 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. wishes to see for himself. He has embarked suc- cessively upon every sort of vessel, — on the galley of Trevirium for Sanastrea in Macedonia ; on the trirème of Carystos for Metapontum^ in Greece; on the Cyllenian skiff for the Island of Samothrace ; on the sandale of Samothrace for Naxos, the home of Bacchus ; on the ceroscaph of Naxos for Syria ; on the Syrian pinnace for Egypt ; and on the ship of the Red Sea for India. It remains for him to make one voyage: he is curious about the dark country; he takes passage on the coffin, and slip- ping the hawser himself, he pushes off into the shadow the obscure barque that is tossed by an unknown sea. 7. Another, Juvenal, has everything in whîch Lucretius fails, — passion, émotion, fever, tragic flame, passion for honesty, the avenging sneer, personality, humanity. He dwells at a certain given point in création, and he contents himself with it, fînding there what may nourish and swell his heart with justice and anger. Lucretius is the universe, Juvenal the locality. And what a local- ity ! Rome. Between the two they are the double voice which speaks to world and town — urbi et orbi. As Juvenal hovers above the Roman Empire, one hears the terrifie flapping of the lâmmergeyer's wings above a nest of reptiles. He pounces upon this swarm and takes them, one after the other, in his terrible beak, — from the adder who is emperor and calls himself Nero, to the earthworm who is a bad poet and calls himself Codrus. Isaiah and ^ Metapontum was a Greek colony in Lucania. Sanastrea the translator 19 unable to ^4. — Tr. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, 5/ Juvenal has each his harlot; but there îs one thing more ominous than the shadow of Babel, — it is the creaking oï the bed of the Caesars; and Babylon is less formidable than Messalina. Juve- nal is the ancient free spirit of the dead republics ; in him there is a Rome of that métal in which Athens and Sparta were cast. Thence in his poetry something of Aristophanes and something of Ly- curgus. Beware of him ; he is severe ! Not a cord is wanting to his lyre, nor to the lash he uses. He is lofty, rigid, austère, glowing, violent, grave, inex- haustible in imagery, harshly gracions, too, when he chooses. His cynicism îs the indignation of modesty. His grâce, thoroughly independent and a true figure of liberty, has claws ; it appears ail at once, enlivening by certain supple and spirited un- dulations the angular majesty of his hexameter. It is as if you saw the Cat of Corinth prowling upon the pediment of the Parthenon. There is some- thing of the epic in this satire ; Juvenal holds in his hand the golden sceptre with which Ulysses beats Thersites. " Bombast, déclamation, exagger- ation, hyperbole," cry the slaughtered deformities ; and thèse cries, stupidly repeated by rhetoricians, are a sound of glory. " To commit thèse things or to relate them, the crime is equal," say Tille- mont, Marc Muret, Garasse, etc., — fools who, like Muret, are sometimes knaves. Juvenal's invective has been blazing for two thousand years, — a fearfui flame of poetry, which burns Rome in the présence of the centuries. The fire still flashes upon that radiant hearth, and, far from diminishing with time, increases under îts mournful cloud of smoke. 58 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. From it proceed rays in behalf of liberty, probîty, heroîsm; and it may be said that Juvenal sends even înto our civilization spirits born of his light. What is Régnier? what D'Aubigné? what Cor- neille? Scintillations from Juvenal. 8. Another, Tacitus, is the historian. Liberty is incarnate in him, as in Juvenal, and ascends, dead, to the seat of judgment, having for a toga her winding-sheet, and "summons tyrants to her bar. Juvenal, we hâve just said, is the soûl of a nation embodied in a man; the same is also true of Tacitus. By the side of the poet who condemns, stands the historian who punishes. Tacitus, seated on the curule chair of genius, summons and seizes in flagrante delicto those criminals, the Caesars. The Roman Empire is a long crime. This crime is begun by four démons, — Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, Nero. Tiberius, the impérial spy; the eye which watches the world; the fîrst dictator who dared to pervert to his personal service the law of majesty made for the Roman people ; know- îng Greek, intellectual, sagacious, sarcastic, élo- quent, terrible ; loved by informers ; the murderer of citizens, of knights, of the senate, of his wife, of his family ; having rather the air of stabbing nations than of massacring them ; humble before the Bar- barians ; a ^traitor with Archelaus, a coward with Artabanus; having two thrones, — Rome for his ferocity, Capreae for his baseness; an inventor of vices and of names for thèse vices ; an old man with a seraglio of young girls ; gaunt, bald, crooked, bandy- legged, fetid, eaten up with leprosy, covered with suppurg-tions, masked with plasters, crowned with WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 59 laurels; having ulcers like Job, and the sceptre besides; surrounded by an oppressive silence; seeking a successor, scenting out Caligula, and finding him good : a viper choosing a tiger. Calig ula, the man who has known fear, the slave be- come master, trembling under Tiberius, terrible after Tiberius, vomiting his fright of yesterday in atrocîty. This mad fool has not his equal. An executioner makes a mistake, and kills, instead of the condemned one, an innocent man; Caligula smiles and says, " The condemned liad not more deserved it." He has a woman eaten alive by dogs, to enjoy the sight. He lies publicly upon his three sîsters, ail stark naked. One of them dies, — Dru- silla; he says, " Behead those who do not bewail her, for she is my sister ; and crucify those who bewail her, for she is a goddess." He makes his horse a pontiff, as, later on, Nero will make his monkey a god. He offers to the universe the wretched spectacle of the annihilation of intellect by suprême power. A prostitute, a sharper, a robber, breaking the busts of Homer and Virgil, his head dressed as A polio with rays, and his feet shod with wings like Mercury, frenetically master of the world, desiring incest with his mother, wish- îng a plague to his empire, famine to his people, rout to his army, his own resemblance to the gods, and one sole head to the human race, that he might eut it off, — such is Caius Caligula. He forces the son to assist at the torment of the father, and the husband at the violation of the wife, and to laugh. Claudius is a mère sketch of a ruler, a pièce of a man made a tyrant, a crowned noodle. He hides 6Ô WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. hîmself ; they discover him, they draghim from hîs hole, and they throw him, terrified, upon the throne. Emperor, he still trembles, having the crown, but not sure that he has his head. He feels for his head at times, as if he searched for it. Then he gets more confident, and decrees three new letters to be added to the alphabet. He is a learned man, this idiot. They strangle a senator ; he says, " I did not order it; but since it is done, it is well." His wife prosti- tutes herself before him. He looks at her, and says, " Whp is this woman ? " He scarcely exists ; he is a shadow : but this shadow crushes the world. At length the hour for his departure arrives : his wife poisons him ; his doctor finishes him. He says, " I am saved," and dies. After his death they come to see his corpse ; during his life they had seen his ghost. Nero is the most formidable figure of ennui that has ever appeared among men. The yawning monster that the ancients called Livor and the mod- ems call Spleen, gives us this riddle to guess, — Nero. Nero seeks simply a distraction. Poet, come- dian, singer, coachman, exhausting ferocity to find voluptuousness, trying a change of sex, the husband of the eunuch Sporus and bride of the slave Pythag- oras, and promenading the streets of Rome between his husband and hîs wife. He has two pleasures, — one, to see the people clutching gold-pieces, dia- monds, and pearls ; and the other, to see the lions clutch the people. An incendiary for curiosity's sake, and a matricide for want of employment. It îs to thèse four that Tacitus dedicates his first gib- bets. Their reigns he hangs about their necks like a coUar. His book of * Caligula ' is lost. Nothing WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, 6l îs easîer to comprehend than the loss and oblitéra- tion of books of this sort. To read them was a crime. A man having been caught reading the history of Caligula by Suetonius, Commodus had him thrown to the wild beasts. ** Feris objici jus- sit," says Lampridius. The horror of those days îs awful. Manners, below and above staîrs, are ferocious. You may judge of the cruelty of the Romans by the atrocity of the Gauls. An insur- rection breaks out in Gaul. The peasants place the Roman ladies, naked and still alive, on harrows whose points enter hère and there into the body ; then they eut off their breasts and sew them in their mouths, that they may hâve the appearance of eating them. Vix vindicta est, " this is scarcely retaliation," says the Roman gênerai Turpilianus. Thèse Roman ladies had the practice, while chat- tîng with their lovers, pf sticking gold pins in the breasts of the Persian or Gallic slaves who dressed their hair. Such is the human specta- cle at which Tacitus is présent; the sight of it renders him terrible. He states the facts, and leaves you to draw your own conclusions. It îs only in Rome that a Potiphar mother of Joseph is to be met.^ When Agrippina, reduced to her last resource, seeing her grave in the eyes ,of her son, offers him her bed, when her lips seek those of Nero, Tacitus is there, following her with his eyes : ** Lasciva oscula et praenuntias flagitii blandi- tias ; " and he denounces to the world this effort of a monstrous and trembling mother to make matrî- 1 The original reads : " La Putiphar mère du JosepK cVst ce qu*on ne rencontre que dans Rome." — Tr. 62 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. cide miscarry by means of incest. Whatever Jus- tus Lipsius, who bequeathed his pen to the Holy Virgin, may hâve said about it, Domitian exiled Tacitus, and he did well. Men like Tacitus are unwholesome for authority. Tacitus applies his style to the shoulder of an emperor, and the brand remains. Tacitus always makes his thrust at the required spot, and leaves a deep scar. Juvenal, all-powerful poet, deals about him, scatters, makes a show, falls and rebounds, strikes right and left a hundred blows at a time, on laws, manners, corrupt magistrates, on bad verses, on libertines and the idle, on Caesar, on the people, everywhere; he is lavish, like hail; his strokes scatter, like those of the scourge. Tacitus has the incisiveness of red- hot iron. 9. Another, John, is the virginal old man. AU the ardent juices of man seem subtilized within him, fiUing his brain fvith visionary wraiths. One does not escape love. Love, unappeased and dïs- contented, changes itself at the end of life înto an outflow of gloomy fancies. The woman wants man; otherwise man, instead of human poetry, will hâve a phantom poetry. Some beings, how- ever, resist the universal generative tendency, and then they are in that peculiar state in which men are subject to monstrous inspirations. The Apoc- alypse is the almost insane masterpiece of this dreadful chastity. John, while young, was gentle and shy. Having loved Jésus, he could love noth- ing else. There is a profound resemblance be- tween the Song of Songs and the Apocalypse; they are both explosions of pent-up virginity. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 63 The heart, mighty volcano, bursts înto éruption; there proceeds from it thîs dove, the Song of Songs, or this dragon, the Apocalypse. Thèse two poems are the two pôles of ecstasy, — volup- tuousness and horror; the two extrême limits of the soûl are attained. In the first poem ecstasy exhausts love, in the second, terror; and this ecstasy inspires in mankind, henceforth forever disquieted, the dread of the eternal précipice. Another resemblance, not less worthy of attention, there is between John and Daniel. The nearly invisible thread of affinity is carefully followed by the eye of those who see in the prophétie spirit a human and normal phenomenon, and who, far from disdaining the question of miracles, general- ize it, and calmly connect it with permanent laws. Religions lose, and science gains by the process. It has not been sufficiently remarked that the seventh chapter of Daniel contains the germ of the Apocalypse. Empires are there represented as beasts. Legend has therefore associated the two poets, making the one pass through the lions* den, and the other through the caldron of boiling oil. Independently of the legend, the life of John is noble, — an exemplary life, subject to marvellous expansions, passing from Golgotha to Patmos, and from the exécution of the Messiah to the exile of the prophet John, after having been présent at the sufferings of Christ, ends by suffering on his own account. The suffering seen makes him an apostle, the suffering endured makes him a sage ; from the growth of the trial results the growth of the spirit. Bishop, he wrîtes the Gospel; proscribed, N 64 WILLIAM SHAKESPEAkÊ, he composes the Apocalypse, — a tragîc work, written under the dictation of an eagle, the poet having above his head we know not what mournful flappîng of wings. The whole Bible is between two dreamers, Moses and John. This poem of poems émerges from chaos in Genesis, and passes out of vîew amid the thunders of the Apocalypse. John was one of the great wanderers of the tongue of fire. During the Last Supper his head was on the breast of Jésus, and he could say, '* Mine ear has heard the beating of God's heart." He went about to relate it to men. He spoke a barbarous Greek, mingled wîth Hebrew expressions and Syrian words, — a language of a wild, harsh charm. He went to Ephesus, he went to Media, he went among the Parthians. He dared to enter Ctesi- phon, a town of the Parthians, built as a coun- terpoise to Babylon. He faced the living idol, Cobaris, king, god, and man, forever îmmovable on his pierced block of nephritic jade, which serves him as throne and latrine. He evangelized Per- sia, which the Scriptures call Paras. When he appeared at the Council of Jérusalem, he was regarded as a pillar of the Church. He looked with stupéfaction at Cerinthus and Ebion, who said that Jésus was but a man. When they ques- tioned him upon the mystery, he answered, " Love one another." He died at the âge of ninety-four years, under Trajan. According to tradition, he îs not dead ; he îs spared, and John is ever living at Patmos, as Barbarossa at Kaiserslàutern.^ Cav- erns there are in which thèse mysterious mortals ^ On Kyfïhàuser, the German legends say. — Tr. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, 6$ are waitîng. John as an historian has hîs equals, — Matthew, Luke, Mark; as a visionary he îs alone. There is no dream that approaches hîs, such a reach ît has înto the infinité. His meta- phors issue from eternity, perturbed; his poetry has a profound smile of madness. A light reflected from the Most High is in the eye of this man ; it is the subhme in full aberration. Men do not un- derstand it — scorn it, and laugh. " My dear Thiriot," says Voltaire, "the Apocalypse is a pièce of ordure." Religions, being in want of this book, hâve taken to worshipping it; but it had to be placed upon the altar in order to save it from the ditch. What does it matter? John is a spirit. It îs in John of Patmos, above ail others, that the communication between certain men of genius and the abyss is apparent. In ail other poets we guess this communication ; in John we see it, at moments we touch it, and seem to lay a shuddering hand upon that sombre portai. It is the door that leads toward God. In reading the poem of Patmos, some one seems to push you from behind; the dread entrance, vaguely outlined, arouses mingled terror and longing. Were this ail of John, he would still be colossal. lo. Another, Paul, a saint for the Church, a great man for humanity, represents that miracle, at once divine and human, conversion. It is he to whom the future has appeared. It leaves him haggard; and nothing can be more superb than this face, forever wondering, of the man con- quered by the light. Paul, born a Pharisee, had been a weaver of cameFs-hair for tents, and servant 5 66 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, . of one of the judges of Jésus Christ, Gamaliel; then the Scribes, perceiving his fierce spirit, had educated him. He was a man of the past, he had guarded the clothes of the stone-throwers ; he aspired, having studied with the priests, to be- come an executioner ; he was on the road for this. Ail at once a wave of light émanâtes from the darkness and throws him down from his horse; and henceforth there will be in the history of the human race that wonderful thing, — the road to Damascus. That day of the metamorphosis of Saint Paul is a great day, — keep the date ; ît cor- responds to the 25th of January in our Gregorian calendar. The road to Damascus is essential to the march of Progress. To fall into the truth and to rise a just man, — a transfiguring fall, — that îs sublime. It is the history of Saint Paul ; from his day it will be the history of humanity. The flash of light is something beyond the flash of lightning. Progress will be carried forward by a séries of dazzling visions. As for Saint Paul, who has been thrown down by the force of new conviction, this harsh stroke from on high reveals to him his genius. Once more upon his feet, he goes for- ward ; he will not pause again. " Forward ! " îs his cry. He is a cosmopolite. He loves the out- siders, whom Paganism calls Barbarians, and Chris- tianity calls Gentiles ; he dévotes himself to them. He îs the apostle of the outer world. He writes to the nations epistles in behalf of God. Listen to him speaking to the Galatians : " O foolish Ga- latians ! how can ye go back to the yokes to which ye were tied ? There are no longer either Jews, WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 6j or Greeks, or slaves. Do not perform your grand cérémonies ordained by your laws. I déclare unto you that ail that is nothing. Love one another. It is ail-important that man become a new créa- ture. Ye are called to liberty.'* On Mars Hill at Athens there were steps hewn in rock, which may be seen to this day. Upon thèse steps sat the great judges before whom Orestes had appeared. There Socrates had been judged. Paul went there ; and there, at night (the Areopagus sat only at night), he said to those austère men, " I come to déclare unto you the unknown God." The epistles of Paul to the Gentiles are simple and profound, with the subtlety so marked in its in- fluence over savages. There are in thèse messages gleams of hallucination ; Paul speaks of the celes- tial beings as if he distinctly saw them. Divided, like John, between life and eternity, it seems as though he had a part of his thought on the earth, and a part in the Unknown; and it would seem, at moments, that one of his verses answers to an- other from beyond the dark wall of the tomb. This half-possession of death gives him a personal cer- tainty often whoUy apart from dogma, and stamps his individual convictions with an emphasis which makes him almost heretical. His humility, resting upon the mystery, is lofty. Peter says: "The words of Paul may be taken in a bad sensé." Hilarius Diaconus and the Luciferians ascribe their schism to the epistles of Paul. Paul is at heart so anti-monarchical that King James I., very much encouraged by the orthodox University of Oxford, caused the Epistle to the Romans to be burned by 68 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. the hand of the common hangman. It îs true ît was accompanied with a commentary by David Pareus. Many of Paul's works are rejected by the Church: they are the finest; and among them his Epistle to the Laodiceans, and above ail hîs Apoc- alypse, cancelled by the Council of Rome under Gelasius. It would be curious to compare it with the Apocalypse of John. Over the opening that Paul had made to heaven the Church wrote, " No thoroughfare ! " He is a saint none the less ; that is his officiai consolation. Paul has the restless- ness of the thinker ; text and formulary are little for him; the letter does not suffice: the letter is mère body. Like ail men of progress, he speaks with reserve of the written law; he prefers grâce to the law, just as we prefer to it justice. What is grâce ? It is the inspiration from on high ; it is the breath, Jlat ubi vult; ît is liberty. Grâce is the spirit of the law. Thîs discovery of the spirit of the law belongs to Saint Paul ; and what he calls ** grâce " from a heavenly point of vîew, we, from an earthly point of view, call " right" Such is Paul. The enlargement of a mind by the in-breaking of light, the beauty of the seizure of a soûl by the truth, shine forth in his person. Herein, we insist, lies the virtue of the journey to Damascus. Who- ever, henceforward, shall désire such growth as this, must foUow the pointing finger of Saint Paul. Ail those to whom justice shall reveal itself, every blindness desirous of the day, ail the cataracts looking to be healed, ail searchers after conviction, ail the great adventurers after virtue, ail servants of the good in quest of the true, must follow this WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 69 road. The light that they find there shall change nature, for the light is always relative to darkness ; ît shall increase în intensity ; after having been rév- élation, it shall be rationalisai : but it shall ever be the light. Voltaire, like Saint Paul, is on the foad to Damascus. The road to Damascus shall be forever the route of great minds. It shall also be the route of nations. For nations, those vast individualisais, hâve, like each of us, their crisis and their hour; Paul, after his august fall, arose again, armed against ancîent errors with the flashîng blade of Christian- ity; and two thousand years after, France also, struck to earth by the light, arouses herself, hold- ing in hand the flaming sword of Révolution. II. Another, Dante, has constructed withîn his own mind the bottomless pit. He has made the epic of the spectres. He rends the earth ; în the terrible hole he has made, he puts Satan. Then he pushes the world through Purgatory up to Heaven. Where ail else ends, Dante begins. Dante îs beyond man ; beyond, not without, — a singular proposition, which, however, has nothing contra- dictory în it, the soûl being a prolongation of man înto the indefinite. Dante twists ail light and ail shadow înto a monstrous spiral ; it descends, then ît ascends. Unexampled architecture! At the threshold is the sacred mist; across the entrance îs stretched the corpse of Hope ; ail that you per- ceive beyond is nîght. Somewhere in the darkness is heard the sobbing of the infinité anguish. You lean over this gulf-poem — is it a crater? You hear détonations ; the verse shoots out, narrow and livid, as from the sulphurous fissures of a volcanic 70 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. région ; what seems vapor takes on a spectral form, — the ghastly shape speaks ; and then you know that the volcano you hâve glimpsed, is Hell. This îs no longer the human environment ; you are in the unknown abyss. In this poem the impondér- able submits to the laws of the pondérable with which it is mingled, as, in the sudden crash of a building on fire, the smoke, carried down by the ruins, falls and rolls with them, and seems caught under the timber and the stones. Hence strange effects ; ideas seem to suffer and to be punished in men. The idea, sufficiently human to suffer expiation, is the phantom, a form of the shadow, impalpable, but not invisible, — an appearance in which there remains sufficient reahty in order that chastisement may hâve a hold upon it ; sin in the abstract state, but preserving the human counte- nance. It is not only the wicked who grieves in this apocalypse, it is evil itself ; there ail possible bad actions are in despair. This spiritualization of penalty gives to the poem a powerful moral bearing. The depth of Hell once sounded, Dante pierces it, and reascends upon the other side of the infinité. In rising, he becomes îdealized, and thought drops the body as a robe. From Virgil he passes to Béatrice: hîs guide to Hell is the poet; his guide to Heaven is poetry. The epic swells into grander proportions as it continues; but man no longer comprehends it. Purgatory and Paradise are not less extraordinary than Gehenna; but as we ascend we lose our interest. We were somewhat at home in Hell, but are no longer so in Hçaven. Wç caunot recognize our WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Jl fellow^ in the angels: perhaps the human eye îs not made for such excess of light; and when the poem becomes happy, it becomes tedious. Such is ever the story of the happy. It is well to marry the lovers or to imparadise the soûls ; but seek the drama elsewhere than there. After ail, what matters it to Dante if you no longer foUow him? He goes on without you. He stalks alone, this lion. His work is a miracle. What a philoso- pher is this visionary! what a sage is this mad- man ! Dante lays down the law for Montesquieu ; the pénal divisions of *UEsprit des Lois' are copied from the classifications in the Hell of the * Divina Commedia.' What Juvenal does for the Rome of the Caesars, Dante does for the Rome of the Popes ; but Dante is a more terrible judge than Juvenal. Juvenal whips with cutting thongs ; Dante scourges with fiâmes. Juvenal condemns; Dante damns. Woe to the living man on whom this traveller fixes the inscrutable glare of his eyes ! 12. Another, Rabelais, is the son of Gaul. And who says Gaul, says also Greece, for the Attic sait and the Gallic jest hâve at bottom the same fiavor ; and if anything, buildings apart, resembles the Piraeus, it is La Rapée.^ Hère is a greater than Aristophanes, for Aristophanes is bad. Rabelais is good, — Rabelais would hâve defended Socrates. In the order of lofty genius, Rabelais chronologi- cally follows Dante ; after the stern face, the sneer- ing visage. Rabelais is the formidable mask of ancient comedy detached from the Greek pro- 1 La Râpée Bercy îs an eastern suburb of Paris, on the Seine. It gives its name to a station on the belt railroad. — Tr. 72 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. scenîum, from bronze made flesh, henceforth a human living face, remaining enormous, and com- ing among us to laugh at us and vvith us. Dante and Rabelais sprîng from the school of the Fran- ciscan friars, as, later. Voltaire springs from the Jesuits; Dante the incarnate sorrow, Rabelais parody, Voltaire irony, — thèse issue from the Church against the Church. Every genius has his invention or his discovery ; Rabelais has made his, — the belly. The serpent is in man, it is the in- testine. It tempts, betrays, and punishes. Man, single being as a spirit, and complex as man, has within himself for his earthly mission three centres, — the brain, the heart, the belly; each of thèse centres is august by one great function which is peculiar to it: the brain has thought, the heart has love, the belly has paternity and maternity. The belly may be tragic. "Feri ventrem," says Agrippina. Catherine Sforza, threatened with the death of her children, who were hostages, exhibits herself naked to the navel on the battlements of the citadel of Rimini, and says to the enemy, "With this I can bring forth others." In one of the epic convulsions of Paris, a woman of the people, standing on a barricade, raised her petti- coat, showed the soldiery her naked belly, and cried, " Kill your mothers ! " The soldiers riddled that belly with bullets. The belly has its heroism ; but it is from it that flow, in life, corruption, — in art, comedy. The breast, where the heart rests, has for its summit the head; the belly has the phallus. The belly, being the centre of matter, is our gratification and our danger; it contains WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, 73 appetite, satiety, and putréfaction. The dévotion, the tenderness, which seize us there, are liable to death; egoism replaces them. Easily do the afifec- tions become lusts. That the hymn can be used in the service of Bacchus, the strophe deformed înto a tippler's catch, is sad. This is the work of the beast which is in man. The belly is essen- tially this beast ; dégradation seems to be its law. The ladder of sensual poetry has for its topmost round the Song of Songs, and for its lowest the jingling ballad. The belly god is Silenus; the belly emperor is Vitellius; the belly animal îs the pig. One of those horrid Ptolemies was called the Belly {Physcon), The belly îs to humanity a formidable weight ; it breaks at every moment the equilibrium between the soûl and the body. It fiUs history ; it is responsible for nearly ail crimes ; it is the matrix of ail vices. It is the belly that by voluptuousness makes the sultan, and by drunk- enness the czar; this it is that shows Tarquin to the bed of Lucrèce ; this it is that makes the Senate which had awaited Brennus and dazzled Jugurtha, end by deliberating on the sauce of a turbot It îs the belly which counsels the ruined libertine, Caesar, the passage of the Rubicon. To pass the Rubicon, how well that pays your debts! To pass the Rubicon, how readily that throws women înto your arms ! What good dinners afterward ! And the Roman soldiers enter Rome with the cry, " Urbani, claudite uxores ; mœchum calvum adducimus." The appetite débauches the intellect. Voluptuousness replaces will. At starting, as îs al- ways the case, there is some nobleness : this is the 74 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, stage of the revel. There is a distinction between being fuddled and being dead drunk. Then the revel dégénérâtes into guzzling. Where there was a Solomoi\ there is Ramponneau. Man becomes a barrel; thought is drowned in an inner déluge of cloudy notions ; conscience, submerged, cannot warn the drunken soûl. Brutalization is consum- mated; it is not even any longer cynical, it is empty and sottish. Diogenes disappears; there remains but the tub. Beginning with Alcibiades, we end with Trimalchio, and the thing^ is com- plète ; nothing ^s left, neither dignity, nor shame, nor honor, nor virtue, nor wit, — crude animal gratification, thorough impurity. Thought is dis- solved in satiety; carnal gorging absorbs every- thing; nothing survives of the grand sovereign créature inhabited by the soûl ; the belly (pass the expression) eats the man. Such is the final state of ail societies where the idéal is eclipsed. This passes for prosperity, and gets the name of growth. Sometimes even philosophers heedlessly further this dégradation by inserting in their doctrines the materialism which is in men's consciences. This sinking of man to the level of the human beast is a great calamity. Its first-fruit is the turpitude visible at the summit of ail professions : the vénal judge, the simoniacal priest, the hireling soldier; laws, manners, and beliefs are a dung-heap, — totus homo fit excrementum. In the sixteenth century, ail the institutions of the past are in that state. Rabelais gets hold of the situation ; he vérifies it ; he authenticates that belly which is the world. Civilization is, then, but WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, 75 a mass, science is matter, religion is blessed with hams, feudality digests, royalty is obèse. What is Henry VIII.? A paunch. Rome is a squab- pampered old dame: is it health? is it sickness? It is perhaps obesity, perhaps dropsy. Rabelais, doctor and priest, feels the puise of the Papacy ; he shakes his head, and bursts out laughing. Is it because he has found life? No, it is because he has felt death; the Papacy is, in reality, breathing its last. While Luther reforms, Rabe- lais jests. Which best attains his end? Rabelais ridicules the monk, the bishop, the Pope ; laugh- ter and death-rattle together ; fooFs bell sounding the tocsin ! But look ! I thought it was a feast — it is a death-agony; one may be deceived in the nature of the hiccup. Let us laugh ail the same : death is at the table ; the last drop toasts the last sigh. A death-agony in the merry mood, — it is superb ! The large intestine is king ; ail that old world feasts and bursts; and Rabelais enthrones a dynasty of bellies, — Grangousier, Pantagruel, and Gargantua. Rabelais is the ^schylus of victuals ; and this is grand when we think that eating is devouring. There is some- thing of the gulf in the glutton. Eat, then, my masters, and drink, and corne to the finale. To live, is a song, of which death is the refrain. Be- neath the depraved human race others may dig dreadful dungeons; but in the direction of the subterranean, Rabelais takes you no farther than the wine-cellar. This universe, which Dante put into Hell, Rabelais confines in a wine-cask; his book is nothing else. The seven circles of Alighieri 76 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. bound and encompass this extraordinary tun. Look within the monstrous cask, and there you see them again. In Rabelais they are entitled Idle- ness, Pride, Envy, Avarice, Wrath, Lechery, Glut- tony ; and it is thus that you suddenly meet again the formidable j ester. Where? In church. The seven deadly sins form the text of this parson*s sermon. Rabelais is a priest. Castigation, prop- erly understood, begins at home ; it is therefore at the clergy that he strikes first. That is what it is to be at home ! The Papacy dies of indigestion. Rabelais plays the Papacy a trick, — the trick of a Titan. The Pantagruelian merriment is not less grandiose than the mirth of a Jupiter. Cheek by jowl: the monarchical and priestly jowl eats; the Rabelaisian cheek laughs. Whoever has read Rabelais has forever before his eyes this stern con- frontment: the mask of comedy fixing its stare upon the mask of theocracy. 13. Another, Cervantes, is also a form of epic mockery; for as the writer of thèse lines said in 1827,^ there are bètween the Middle Ages and modem times, after the feudal barbarism, and placed there as it were to make an end of it, two comic Homers, — Rabelais and Cervantes. To epitomize the horrible in a jest, is not the least terrible manner of doing it. This is what Rabelais did ; it is what Cervantes did : but the raillery of Cervantes has nothing of the broad Rabelaisian grin. It is the fine humor of the noble after the joviality of the parson. Gentlemen, I am the Seignior Don Miguel Cervantes de Saavedra, poct- 1 Préface to Cromwell. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, yj soldîer, and, as a proof, one-armed. No coarse jesting in Cervantes; scarcely a flavor of élégant cynicism. The satirist is fine, acute, polished, délicate, almost gallant, and would even run the rtsk sometimes of diminishing his power, with ail his affected ways, if he had not the deep poetic spirit of the Renascence. That saves his charm- îng grâce from becoming prettiness. Like Jean Goujon, like Jean Cousin, like Germain Pilon, like Primatice, Cervantes is not devoid of illusion. Thence come ail the unexpected marvels of his imagination. Add to that a wonderful intuition of the inmost processes of the mind and a multi- form philosophy which seems to possess a new and complète chart of the human heart. Cervan- tes sees the înner man. His philosophy blends with the comic and romantîc instinct. Hence the unexpected, breaking out at every moment in his characters, in his action, in his style; the unfor- seen, magnificent adventure. Personages remain- îng true to themselves, but facts and ideas whirling around them, with a perpétuai renewing of the original idea and a steady current of that wind which brings the lightning-flash : such is the law of great Works. Cervantes is militant ; he has a thesis, he makes a social book. Such poets are the cham- pions of the intelligence. Where hâve they learned fighting? On the battle-field itself. Juve- nal was a military tribune ; Cervantes comes home from Lepanto, as Dante from Campalbino, as iEschylus from Salamis. Afterward, they pass to a new trial : -^schylus goes into exile, Juvenal in- to exile, Dante into exile, Cervantes into prison. 78 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. This is just, since they hâve done you a service. Cervantes, as poet, has the three sovereign gifts, — ■ création, which produces types and clothes ideas with flesh and bone; invention, which hurls pas- sions against events, kindles in man a flame that outshines the star of destiny, and brings forth the drama ; imagination, sun of the brain, which throws light everywhere, giving to its figures the high- relief of life. Observation, which cornes by acqui- sition, and îs, therefore, not so much a gift as an accomplishment, is included in création; were the miser not observed, Harpagon would not be created. In Cervantes, a new-comer, glimpsed in Rabelais, puts in a decided appearance. You hâve caught sight of him in Panurge, you see him plainly in Sancho Panza. He comes like the Silenus of Plautus, and he may also say, " I am the god mounted on an ass." Wisdom in the begin- ning, reason by and by : such is the strange history of the human mind. What more replète with wisdom than ail the religions? What less reason- able? Morals true, dogmas false. Wisdom exists in Homer and in Job ; reason, such as ît must needs be to overcome préjudices, that îs to say, complète and armed cap-à-pie, will come in only with Voltaire. Common-sense is not wisdom, neither is it reason ; it is a little of one and a little of the other, with a dash of egoism. Cervantes makes it bestride ignorance, and, at the same time, completing his profound satire, he mounts heroism upon fatigue. Thus he shows one after the other, one with the other, the two profiles of man, and parodies them, without more pity for the subHme WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 79 than for the grotesque; the hippogriff becomes Rosinante. Behind the equestrian personage, Cervantes créâtes and sets in motion the asinine personage. Enthusiasm takes the field, Irony locks step with it. The wonderful feats of Don Quixote, his riding and spurring, his big lance steady in the rest, are judged by the ass, — a con- noisseur in windmills. The invention of Cervantes is so masterly that there is, between the human type and the quadruped complément, statuary adhésion ; the babbler, like the adventurer, is part of the beast that is proper to him, and you can no more dismount Sancho Panza than Don Quixote. The Idéal is in Cervantes as in Dante; but it is called the Impossible, and is scoffed at Béatrice is become Dulcinea. To rail at the idéal would be the failing of Cervantes ; but this failing is only apparent. Look well, — the smile has a tear ; in reality, Cervantes sides with Don Quixote, as Molière sides with Alceste. One must learn how to read, especially in the books of the sixteenth century ; there is in almost ail, on account of the threats hanging over freedom of thought, a secret that must be unlocked, and whose key is often lost. Rabelais has his reserves, Cervantes has an aside, Machiavelli wears a mask, — more than one, perhaps. At ail events, the advent of common- sense is the great fact in Cervantes. Common- sense is not a virtue ; it is the eye of self-interest. It would hâve encouraged Themistocles, and dis- suaded Aristides ; Leonidas has no common-sense, Regulus has no common-sense: but in face of selfish and ferocious monarchies dragging their 8o WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, unhappy p copies into their own prîvate wars, decimating families, making mothers desolate, and driving men to kill each other with ail those fine words, — military honor, warlike glory, obédience to orders, etc., etc., — this Common-Sense is an admirable personage, arising suddenly, and crying out to the human race, " Take care of your skin ! " 14. Another, Shakespeare: what is he? You might almost answer, He is the earth. Lucretius is the sphère, Shakespeare is the globe. There is more and less in the globe than in the sphère. In the sphère there is the Ail ; on the globe there is man. Hère the outer, there the inner mys- tery. Lucretius is being, Shakespeare is exist- ence. Hence the shadow that is in Lucretius; hence the teeming life in Shakespeare. Space — " the blue," as the Germans say — is certainly not denied to Shakespeare. The earth sees and trav- erses the heavens; the earth knows them under their two aspects, — darkness and azuré, doubt and » hope. Life comes and goes in death. Ail life is a secret, a sort of enigmatical parenthesis between birth and the death-throe, between the opening and the closing eye. The possession of this secret renders Shakespeare restless. Lucretius is; Shakespeare lives. In Shakespeare the birds sing, the bushes are clothed with green, hearts love, soûls suffer, the cloud wanders, it is hot, it is cold, night falls, time passes, forests and multitudes speak, the vast eternal dream hovers over ail. Sap and blood, ail forms of the multi- ple reality, actions and ideas, man and humanity, the living and the life, solitudes, cities, religions, WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, 8l dîamonds and pearis, dung-hills and charnel- houses, the ebb and flow of beings, the steps of corners and goers, ail, ail are on Shakespeare and in Shakespeare ; and, this genius being the earth, the dead émerge from it. Certain sinister sides of Shakespeare are haunted by spectres. Shake- speare is a brother of Dante : the one complètes the other. Dante incarnates ail supernaturalism, Shakespeare ail Nature; and as thèse two régions, Nature and the supernatural, which appear to us so différent, are really the same unity, Dante and Shakespeare, however dissimilar, hâve con- terminous boundaries and domains in common: there is something of the human in Alighieri, something of the spectre in Shakespeare. The skull passes from the hands of Dante into the hands of Shakespeare. Ugolîno gnaws it, Hamlet questions it; and it exhibits perhaps even a deeper meaning and a loftier teaching in the second than in the first. Shakespeare shakes it and makes stars fall from it. The isle of Pros- pero, the forest of Ardennes, the heath of Har- muir, the platform of Elsinore, are illuminated, no less than the seven circles of Dante's spiral, by the sombre, reflected light of hypothesis. Doubt, half chimera and half truth, is outlined there as well as hère. Shakespeare, as well as Dante, gives us glimpses of the dim horizon of conjecture. In the one as in the other there is the possible, that window of the dream opening upon reality. As for the real, we insist, Shake-" speare overflows with it; everywhere the quick flesh. Shakespeare has émotion, instinct, the true 6 82 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. voîce, the right tone, the whole human multitude with its clamor. His poetry is himself, and at the same time ît is you. Like Homer, Shakespeare is elemental. Men of genius, renewers, — .that is the name for them, — arise at ail the décisive crises of humanity; they epitomize epochs, and complète révolutions. In civilization, Homer indicates the end of Asia and the beginning of Europe ; Shake- speare the end of the Middle Ages. Rabelais and Cervantes also mark the close of the Middle Ages ; but, being essentially satirists, they give but a partial view. Shakespeare's mind is a total ; like Homer, Shakespeare is a cyclic man. Thèse two intelligences, Homer and Shakespeare, close the two gâtes of Barbarism, — the ancient gâte, and the Gothic. That was their mission — they hâve fulfilled it ; that was their task — they hâve accom- plished it. The third great human crisis is the French Révolution; the third huge gâte of bar- barism, the monarchical gâte, is closing at this moment. The nineteenth century hears it rolling on its hinges. Thence for poetry, for the drama, and for art, arises the présent era, equally inde- pendent of Shakespeare and of Homer. CHAPTER III. Homer, Job, ^schylus, Isaiah, Ezekiel, Lucre- tius, Juvenal, Saint John, Saint Paul, Tacitus, Dante, Rabelais, Cervantes, Shakespeare, — that is the WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, 83 avenue of the îmmovable giants of the human mind. Men of genius form a dynasty : indeed, there îs no other. They wear ail the crowns, even that of thorns. Each of them represents the sum-total of absolute truth realizable to man. We repeat it : to choose between thèse men, to prefer one to the other, to point with the finger to the first among thèse first, is impossible. Ail are the Mind. Perhaps, by the strîctest measurements, — and yet every objection would be legitimate, — one might mark out as the highest among thèse summits, Homer, ^Eschylus, Job, Isaiah, Dante, and Shakespeare. It is understood that we speak hère only from the artistic standpoint ; to be still more spécifie, from the standpoint of literary art. Two men in this group, -^schylus and Shake- speare, represent especially the drama. iEschylus, a kind of genius out of hîs time, wor- thy to mark either a beginning or an end in hu- manity, appears not to be placed in his right turn in the séries, and, as we hâve said, seems an elder brother of Homer. If we remember that -^schylus îs nearly sub- merged by the darkness rising over human mem- ory; if we remember that ninety of his plays hâve disappeared, that of that sublime hundred there remain no more than seven dramas, which are also seven odes, — we are astounded by what we see of this genius, and almost terrified by what we do not see. What, then, was iEschylus ? What proportions 84 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. and what forms had he in ail this shadow ? iEs- chylus is up to his shoulders in the ashes of âges ; his head alone rîses above that burial, and, like the colossus of the désert, with his head alone he is as tall as ail the neighboring gods, upright upon their pedestals. Man passes before the insubmergible wreck. Enough remains for an immense glory. What oblivion has swallowed, adds an unknown élément to his grandeur. Buried and eternal, his brow projecting from the sepulchre, ^Eschylus looks forth upon the générations of men. CHAPTER IV. To the eyes of the thinker, thèse men of genîus occupy thrones in the idéal kingdom. To the iri- dividual works that thèse men hâve left us must be added varîous vast collective works, — the Vedas, the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, the Edda, the Nibelungen, the Heldenbuch, the Romancero. Some of thèse works are revealed and sacred. They bear the marks of unknown collaboration. The poems of India, in particular, hâve the omi- nous fulness of the possible, as imagined by in- sanîty or related in the vision. Thèse works seem to hâve been copiposed in common with beings to whom our world is no longer accustomed. Leg- endary horror covers thèse epics. " Thèse books were not composed by man alone," says the in- WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 8$ scrîptîon of Ash-Nagar. Djinns hâve alîghted upon them, polypteral magi hâve mused over them; the texts hâve been interlined by invisible hands, the demi-gods hâve been aided by demi-demons ; the éléphant, which India calls the Sage, has been consulted. Thence cornes a majesty almost hor- rible. The great enigmas are in thèse poems: they are fuU of mysterious Asia. Theîr promî- nent parts hâve the supernatural and hideous outline of chaos. They form a mass above the horizon, like the Himalayas. The distance of the manners, beliefs, ideas, actions, persons, is extra- ordinary. One reads thèse poems with that won- dering droop of the head induced by the profound distance between the book and the reader. This Holy Writ of Asia has evidently been still more difficult to reduce and to co-ordinate than our own. It is in every part refractory to unity. In vain hâve the Brahmins, like our priests, erased and înterpolated : Zoroaster is there; Ized Serosch is there. The Eschem of the Mazdaean traditions is discernible under the name of Siva; Manicheism is apparent between Brahma and Booddha. AU kinds of traces blend, cross, and recross each other in thèse poems. One perceives in them the mysterious footprints of a race of intelligences who hâve worked at them in the darkness of the centuries. Hère is the enormous toe of the giant ; there, the claw of the chimera. Thèse poems are the pyramid of a vanîshed colony of ants. The Nibelungen, another pyramid of another multitudinous race, has the same greatness. What the divinities did in Asia, the elves hâve done hère. 86 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. Thèse powerful epic legends, the testaments of âges, tattooings stamped by races on history, hâve no other unity than the unity of the people itself. The collective and the successive, combining to- gether, are one. Turba fit mens. Thèse récitals are clouds, laced by wonderful flashes of light. As to the Romancero, which créâtes the Cid after Achilles, and the chivalric after the heroic, it is the Iliad of several lost Homers. Count Julian, King Roderigo, Cava, Bernardo del Carpio, the bastard Mudarra, Nuno Salido, the Seven Infantes of Lara, the Constable Alvar de Luna, — no Orien- tal or Hellenic type surpasses thèse figures. The horse of Campeador is equal to the dog of Ulys- ses. Between Priam and Lear you must place Don Arias, the old man of Zamora's tower, sacri- ficing his seven sons to his duty, and tearing them from his heart one by one. There is grandeur in that. In présence of thèse sublimities the reader suffers a sort of sun-stroke. Thèse works are anonymous; and, owing to tte great reason of the homo sum^ while admiring them, while assigning them a place at the summit of art, we prefer the acknowledged works. With equal beauty, the Ramayana touches us less than Shakespeare. The ego of a man is more vast and profound even than the ego of a people. However, thèse composite myriologues, the great testaments of India particularly, expanses of poetry rather than poems, an expression, at once sidereal and bestial, of vanished races, dérive from their very deformity an . indescribable supernatural air. The multiple ego expressed by those myriologues WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, 8/ makes them the polypi of poetry, vague and won- derful monstrosîties. The strange seams of the antediluvian rough outline are visible there, as in the ichthyosaurus or the pterodactyl. One of thèse black, many-headed masterpieces throws upon the horizon of art the silhouette of a hydra. The Greek genius is not deceived by them, and abhors them ; Apollo would attack them. Beyond and above ail thèse collective and anonymous pro- ductions (the Romancero excepted), there are men to represent the peoples. Thèse men we hâve just named. They give to nations and periods the human countenance. They are, in art, the incar- nations of Greece, of Arabia, of Judaea, of Pagan Rome, of Christian Italy, of Spain, of France, of England. As for Germany, — the matrix, like Asia, of races, hordes, and nations, — she is represented în art by a sublime man, equal, although in a différ- ent category, to ail those that we hâve characterized above. That man is Beethoven. Beethoven is the German soûl. What a shadow îs this Germany! She is the India of the West. She contains everything ; there îs no formation more colossal. In the sacred mist where the German spirit moves, Isidore of Seville places theology; Albertus the Great, scholasti- cism; Hrabanus Maurus, linguistics; Trithemius, astrology ; Ottni, chivalry ; Reuchlin, vast curî- osity ; Tutilo, universality ; Stadianus, method ; Luther, înquiry ; Albrecht Diirer, art ; Leibnitz, sci- ence ; Puffendorf, law ; Kant, philosophy ; Fichte, metaphysics; Winkelmann, archaeology; Herder, aesthetics ; the Vossii, — of whom one, Gérard 88 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. John, was of the Palatînate, — érudition ; Euler, the spirit of intégration ; Humboldt, the spirit of dis- covery ; Niebuhr, history ; Gottfried of Strasburg, fable ; Hoffmann, dreams ; Hegel, doubt ; Ancillon, obédience ; Werner, fatahsm ; Schiller, enthusiasm ; Goethe, indifférence ; Arminius, liberty. Kepler lights this shadow with the stars. Gérard Groot, the founder of the Fratres Corn- munis Vitœy makes in Germany a first attempt at fraternity, in the fourteenth century. Whatever may hâve been her infatuation for the indifférence of Goethe, do not deem her impersonal ; she is a nation, and one of the most générons : for her, Rûckert, the military poet, forges the ' Geharnischte Sonnette ' (* Sonnets in Coat of Mail '), and she shudders when Korner hurls at her the Song of the Sword. She îs the German fatherland, the great beloved land, Teutonia mater, Galgacus was to the Germans what Caractacus was to the Britons. Within herself and at home, Germany has every- thîng. She shares Charlemagne with France, and Shakespeare with England ; for the Saxon élément is mingled with the British élément. She has an Olympus, the Valhalla. She must needs hâve her own style of writing. Ulfilas, bishop of Mœsia.. învents it for her, and the Gothic caligraphy will henceforth form a pendant to the Arabie. The capital letter of a mîssal rivais the fantastical signature of a caliph. Like China, Germany has învented printing. Her Burgraves (this remark has been aiready made ^) are to us what the Titans are to iEschylus. To the temple of Tanfana, destroyed * Préface to the Burgraves, 1843. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 89 by Germanicus, she caused the cathedral of Cologne to succeed. She is the ancestress of our hîstory, the grandam of our legends. From ail parts, — from the Rhine and from the Danube, from the Rauhe Alp, from the ancient Sylva Gabresa^ from Upper Lorraine and from Lower Lorraine, through the Wigalois and through the Wigamur, through Henry the Fowler, through Samo King of the Vends, through Rothe the chronicler of Thuringia, through Zwinger the chronicler of Alsace, through Gansbein the chronicler of Limburg, through ail those ancient popular songsters, Hans Folz, Jean Viol, Muscatblut, through those rhapsodists the Minnesîngers, — from ail sources the taie, that form of dream, reaches her and enters into her genius. At the same time languages flow from her. From her fissures gush, to the North, the Danîsh and Swedîsh; to the West, the Dutch and Flemish. The German passes the Channel and becomes the English. In the intellectual or- der, the German genius has other frontiers than Germany. A given people may resist Germany and yield to Germanism. The German spirit as- similâtes to itself the Greeks by Mùller, the Servians by Gerhard, the Russians by Goëtre, the Magyars by Mailath. When Kepler, in the présence of Rudolph IL, was preparing the Rudolphine Tables, it was \Vith the aid of Tycho Brahe.^ German af- finities extend far. Without any altération in the local and national autonomies, it is with the great 1 The Rudolphine Tables, published in 1627, appear to hâve been prepared long after the death q£ Tycho, which occurred in 1601. — Tr. 90 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. Germanie centre that the Scandinavian spirit în Oehlenschlàger and the Batavian spirit in Vondel are connected. Poland unités herself to it, with ail her glory, from Copernîcus to Kosciusko, from Sobieski to Mickiewicz. Germany is the wellspring of nations. They pass out of her like rivers ; she receives them as a sea. The vast murmur of the Hercynian forest seems to be heard throughout Europe. The German nature, profound and subtle, distinct from the Eu- ropean nature, but in harmony with it, volatilizes and floats above the nations. The German mind îs misty, luminous, dispersed ; it is a kind of im- mense beclouded soûl, with stars. Perhaps the highest expression of Germany can be given only by music. Music, by its very want of précision, which in this case is a quality, goes wherever the German soûl goes. If the German spirit had as much densîty as ex- pansion, — that is to say, as much will as power, — she could, at a given moment, lift up and save the human race. Such as she is, she is sublime. In poetry she has not said her last word. At this hour the indications are excellent. Sînce the jubilee of the noble Schiller, particularly, there has been an awakening, and a generous awakening. The great définitive poet of Germany will be neces- sarily a poet of humanity, of enthusiasm, of liberty. Perchance — and some signs give token of it — we may soon see him arise from the young group of contemporary German writers. Music (we beg indulgence for the figure) îs the vapor of art. It is to poetry what revery is to WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. CI thought, what fluid îs to liquid, what the océan of clouds is to the océan of waves. If another analogy is desired, it is the indefinite of this infinité. The same insufflation impels, swef ps away, transports, and overwhelms it, fiUs it with agitation and gleams and unutterable sounds, saturâtes it with electri- city, and causes it to give forth sudden discharges of thunder. Music is the Word of Germany. The German people, so much curbed as a nation, so emanci- pated as thinkers, sing with a sombre delight. To sing, seems a deHverance from bondage. Music expresses that which cannot be said, and which cannot be suppressed. Therefore is Germany ail music, in anticipation of the time when she shall be ail freedom. Luther's choral is a kind of Marseillaise. Everywhere are singing-clubs and choral circles. In the fields of Swabian Esslingen, on the banks of the Neckar, comes every year the Festival of Song. The Liedertnusik, of which Schubert's ' Elf-King ' is the masterpiece, makes a part of German life. Song is for Germany a breathing: it is by singing that she respires and conspires. The music-note being the syllable of a kind of undefined universal language, Germany's grand communication with the human race is made through harmony, — an admirable prélude to unity. It is by the clouds that the rains which fertilize the earth ascend from the sea ; it is by music that ideas emanate from Germany to take possession of the minds of men. Therefore we may say that Ger- many's greatest poets are her musicians, of which wonderful family Beethoven is the head. 92 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. Homer îs the great Pelasgîan; iEschylus, the great Hellène ; Isaiah, the great Hebrew; Juvenal, the great Roman ; Dante, the great Italian ; Shake- speare, the great Englishman ; Beethoven, the great German. CHAPTER V. The dethroned " Good Taste," — that other " right divine " which for so long a time weighed upon Art, and which had sucçeeded in suppressing the beautiful for the benefit of the pretty, — the an- cient criticism, not altogether dead, like the ancient monarchy, find from their point of view the same fault, exaggeration, in those sovereign men of ge- nius whom we hâve enumerated.^ Thèse men of genius are extravagant. This arises from the in- finité élément within them ; they are, in fact, not circumscribed. They contain something unknown. Every reproach that is addressed to them might be addressed to the Sphinx. People reproach Ho- mer for the carnage which fills his den, the Iliad ; -^schylus, for his monstrousness ; Job, Isaiah, Eze- kiel, Saint Paul, . for double meanings; Rabelais, 1 To those unacquainted with the history of French literature durîng the thirties and forties of this century, this sentence may require explanation. Good taste (le bon goût) and the ancient criticism were the legitimate literary monarchs, against whose régime Victor Hugo's career was a continuons insurrection. If " Bon Goût " is an ex-king, Victor Hugo is his Cromwell or his Brutus. — Tr. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 93 for obscène nudity and venomous ambîguity; Cer- vantes, for insidious laughter ; Shakespeare, for hîs subtlety; Lucretius, Juvenal, Tacitus, for obscu- rity; John of Patmos and Dante Alighierî, for darkness. There are other minds, very great, but less great, who can be reproached with none of thèse faults. Hesiod, iEsop, Sophocles, Euripides, Plato, Thu- cydides, Anacreon, Theocritus, Titus Lîvius, Sal- lust, Cicero, Terence, Virgil, Horace, Petrarch, Tasso, Ariosto, La Fontaine, Beaumarchais, Vol- taire, hâve neither exaggeration nor darkness, nor obscurity nor monstrousness. What, then, do they lack? Something the others hâve; that some- thing is the Unknown, the Infinité. If Corneille had that " something," he would be the equal of iEschylus. If Milton had that " some- thing," he would be the equal of Homer. If Mo- lière had that " something," he would be the equal of Shakespeare. It is the misfortune of Corneille that he muti- lated and contracted the old native tragedy in obédience to fixed rules. It is the misfortune of Milton that, through Puritan melancholy, he ex- cluded from his work Nature, the great Pan. It îs Molière's faîling that, in dread of Boileau, he quickly extinguishes the luminous style of the ' Étourdi,' that, for fear of the priests, he writes too few scènes like that of the poor man in * Don Juan.' 1 To give no occasion for attack, îs a négative per- fection. It îs fine to be open to attack. 1 The scène referred to is the second of the thîrd act — Tr. 94 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. Indeed, penetrate the meaning of those words, placed as masks upon the mysterious qualities of genius, and under obscurîty, subtlety, and darkness, you find depth ; under exaggeration, imagination ; under monstrousness, grandeur. Therefore in the upper région of poetry and thought there are Homer, Job, Isaiah, Ezekiel, Lucretius, Juvenal, Tacitus, John of Patmos, Paul of Damascus, Dante, Rabelais, Cervantes, Shake- speare. Thèse suprême men of genius do not form a closed séries. The author of All adds to it a name when the needs of progress require it. BOOK IIL ART AND SCIENCE. CHAPTER I. MANY people in our day, especially stock- brokers, and often attorneys, say and re- peat, " Poetry is passîng away." It is almost as if they said : " There are no more roses ; spring bas breatbed its last ; the sun bas lost tbe babit of rising ; you may roam ail tbe fields of eartb, and not find a butterfly ; tbere is no more moonligbt, and tbe nigbtingale sings no more ; tbe lion's roar is no longer beard ; tbe eagle no longer soars ; tbe Alps and tbe Pyrénées bave passed away; tbere are no more lovely girls and bandsome young men ; no one ever muses now over a grave ; tbe motber no longer loves ber cbild ; beaven is quencbed; tbe buman beart is dead." Were it permitted us to mingle tbe fortuitous witb tbe eternal, it would be ratber tbe contrary wbicb would prove true. Never bave tbe facul- ties of tbe buman mind, deepened and enricbed by tbe mysterious plougbing of révolution, been profounder and loftier. 96 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. And wait a lîttle ; gîve tîme for the realîzatîon of that élément of social well-being i^ow impend- îng, — gratuitous and compulsory éducation. How long will it take? A quarter of a century. Im- agine the incalculable sum of intellectual develop- ment implied in this single expression : ** Every one can read." The multiplication of readers is the multiplication of loaves. On the day when Christ created that symbol, he caught a glimpse of print- ing. His miracle is this marvel. Hère is a book: with it I will feed five thousand soûls, a hundred thousand soûls, a million soûls — ail humanity. In the action of Christ bringing forth the loaves, there îs Gutenberg bringing forth books. One sower heralds the other. What has the human race been since the begin- nîng of time? A reader. For a long time he has spelled ; he spells yet : soon he will read. This child, six thousand years old, has been at school from the first Where? In Nature. At the beginning, having no other book, he spelled the universe. He has had his primary instruc- tion from the clouds, from the firmament, from meteors, flowers, animais, forests, seasons, phe- nomena. The lonian fisherman studies the wave; the Chaldaean shepherd spells the star. Then came the first books, — a sublime advance. The book is vaster yet than that grand scène, the world ; for to the fact it adds the idea. If any- thing is greater than God seen in the sun, it is God seen in Homer. The universe without the book, is science be- coming rudely outlined; the universe with the WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 97 book, îs the îdeal making îts appearance. Thence an immédiate modification in human afTairs ; where there had been only force, power is revealed. The application of the idéal to actual facts produces civilization. Poetry written and sung begîns îts work, — a gloriously effective déduction from the poetry only seen. It is startling to perceive that where science was dreaming, poetry acts. With a touch of the lyre, the thinker dispels ferocity. We shall return, later on, to this power of the book; we do not insist on it at présent: it is clear as light. Many writers then, few readers: such has the world been up to this day. But a change is at hand. Compulsory éducation îs a recruitment of soûls for the light. Henceforth ail human advancement will be accomplished by swell- îng the légions of those who read. The diameter of the moral and idéal good corresponds always to the calibre of men's minds. In proportion to the worth of the brain is the worth of the heart. The book is the tool of this transformation. What humanity requires, is to be fed with light; such nourishment is found in reading. Thence the importance of the school, everywhere adé- quate to civilization. The human race îs at last on the point of spreading the book wîde open. The immense human Bible, composed of ail the prophets, of ail the poets, of ail the philosophers, is about to shine and blaze under the focus of that enormous lumînous lens, — compulsory éducation. Humanity reading is humanity knowing. What nonsense, then, it îs to cry, " Poetry îs passr ing away ! " We might say, on the contrary, poetry 7 98 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. îs coming. For who says poetry, says phîlosophy and light. Now, the reign of the book is begîn- ning; the school is its purveyor. Exalt the reader, you exalt the book. Not, certainly, in intrînsîc value, — this remains what it was ; but in efficient power: ît influences where it had no influence; mens soûls become its subjects to good ends. It was only beautiful; it becomes useful. Who would venture to deny this? The circle of readers enlarging, the circle of books read will in- crease. Now, the désire to read being a train of powder, once lighted it will not stop: and this, combihed with the simplification of hand-labor by machinery, and with the increased leisure of man, the body less fatigued leaving the mind freer, vast appetites for thought will spring up in ail brains ; the insatiable thirst for knowledge and méditation will become more and more the human préoc- cupation; low places will be deserted for high places, — an ascent natural to every growing in- telligence ; people will quit * Faublas ' to read * The Oresteia ; ' there they will taste the noble, and, once tasting it, they will never be satiated; men will make the beautiful their food, because the refinement of minds augments in proportion to their force; and a day will come when, the fulness of cîvilization making itself manjfest, those mountain-tops, Lucretius, Dante, Shake- speare, for âges almost deserted, and visited only by the sélect few, will be crowded with intelli- gences seeking their food upon the heîghts. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 99 CHAPTER II. There can be but one law; the unîty of law results from the unity of essence : Nature and Art are the two slopes of the same fact. And în prin- ciple, saving the restriction which we shall indicate very shortly, the law of one is the law of the othen The angle of reflection equals the angle of inci- dence. Ail being equity in the moral order, and equilibrium in the material order, ail is équation in the întellectual order. The binomial, that marvel adjustable to everything, is included in poetry no less than in algebra. Nature plus humanity, raised to the second power, give Art. Such is the Intel- lectual binomial. Now, replace this A + B by the number proper to each great artist and each great poet, and you will hâve, in its multiple physiog- nomy and in its strict total, each of the créations of the human mind. What more beautiful than the variety of masterpieces resulting from the unity of law? Poetry, like Science, has an abstract root. Science produces from that root masterpieces of métal, wood, fire, or air, — machine, ship, locomo- tive, aérostat; Poetry causes to grow from ît the masterpiece of flesh and blood, Iliad, Song of Songs, Romancero, Divine Comedy, Macbeth. Nothing so starts and prolongs the thrill felt by the thinker as those mysterious exfoliations of abstraction into reality in the double région (the one positive, the other infinité) of human lOO WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, thought, — a région double, and nevertheless one : the infinité is an exactitude. The profound word " number" is at the base of man's thought; it is, to our intelligence, elemental ; it signifies harmony as well as mathematics. Number reveals itself to Art by rhythm, which is the beating of the heart of the Infinité. In rhythm, the law of order, God is felt. A verse is numerous, like a crowd ; its feet march with the cadenced step of a légion. Without number, no science; without number, no poetry. The strophe, the epic, the drama, the riotous pal- pitation of man, the bursting forth of love, the irradiation of the imagination, the lightning-cloud of passion, ail are lorded over by this mysterious word " number," even as are geometry and arith- metic. Ajax, Hector, Hecuba, the seven chiefs before Thebes, Œdipus, Ugolino, Messalina, Lear and Priam, Romeo, Desdemona, Richard III., Pantagruel, the Cid, Alceste, ail belong to it, as well as conic sections and the differential and intégral calculus. It starts from "two and two make four,*' and ascends to the région where the lightning sits. Yet between Art and Science let us note a radi- cal différence. Science is perfectible ; Art, not. Why? WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. lOI CHAPTER III. Among human thîngs, and înasmuch as ît îs a human thing, Art is a strange exception, The beauty of everything hère below lies în the power of reaching perfection. Everything îs en- dowed with this property. To increase, to aug- ment, to win strength, to make some gain, some advance, to be worth more to-day than yesterday : this is at once glory and life. The beauty of Art lies in not being susceptible of improvement. Let us insist on thèse essential ideas, already touched upon in some of the preceding pages. A masterpiece exîsts once for ail. The first poet who arrives, arrives at the summit. You shall ascend after him, as high, not higher. Ah ! your name is Dante? Very well; but he who sits yonder is named Homer! Progress, its goal incessantly changîng, îts stages constantly renewed, has a shifting horizon. Not so the idéal* Now, progress is the motive-power of Science ; the idéal is the generator of Art. Thus is explained why perfection is the charac- teristic of Science, and npt of Art. A savant may outshine a savant; a poet never throws a poet into the shade. Art progresses after its own fashîon, ît shifts its ground, like Science ; but îts successive créations, contaîning the unchangeable, abide ; while the I02 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. admirable guesses of Scîence, which are and can be nothing but combinatîons of the contingent, obliterate each other. Science is relative ; Art définitive. The master- piece of to-day will be the masterpiece of to-morrow. Does Shakespeare change anything in Sophocles? Does Molière take anything from Plautus? Even when he borrows Amphitryon, he does not take it from him. Does Figaro blot out Sancho Panza? Does Cordelia suppress Antigone? No. Poets do not climb over each other. The one îs not the stepping-stone of the other. The poet rises alone, without any other lever than himself. He does not tread his equal under foot. The new-comers respect theîr elders. They succeed, they do not replace each other. The beautiful does not drive out the beautiful. Neither wolves nor master- pieces devour each other. Saint-Simon says (I quote from memory) : " There was through the whole wînter but one cry of admiration for M. de Cambray's book; when suddenly appeared M. de Meaux's book, which devoured it.'* If Fénelon's book had been Saint- Simon's, the book of Bossuet would not hâve devourednt. Shakespeare is not above Dante, Molière îs not above Aristophanes, Calderon is not above Euripi- des ; the Divine Comedy is not above Genesis, the Romancero is not above the Odyssey; Sirius is not above Arcturus. Sublimity is equality. The human mind is the infinité possible. The master-works, immense worlds, are generated with- in it unceasingly, and abide there forever. No WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, I03 crowding of one against the other ; no recoil. The occlusions, when there are any, are but apparent, and quickly cease. The expanse of the boundless admits ail créations. Art, taken as art, and in itself, goes neither for- ward nor backward. The transformations of poetry are but the undulations of the beautiful, useful to human movement. Human movement is another side of the question, a side that we cer- tainly do not overlook, and that we shall examine farther on. Art is not susceptible of intrinsic progress. From Phidias to Rembrandt, there is movement, but not progress. The frescos of the Sistine Chapel take absolutely nothing from the métopes of the Parthenon. Retrace your steps as far as you like, — from the palace of Versailles to Heidelberg Castle, from Heidelberg Castle to Notre Dame of Paris, from Notre Dame of Paris to the Alhambra, from the Alhambra to St. Sophia, from St. Sophia to the Colosseum, from the Colosseum to the Propylaea, from the Propylaea to the Pyra- mids ; you may go backward in centuries, you do not go backward in art. The Pyramids and the Iliad remain in the foreground. Masterpieces hâve a level, the same for ail, the absolute. The absolute once reached, ail is said. That cannot be excelled. The eye can bear but a certain quantity of dazzling light. Thence comes the assurance of poets. They lean upon the future with a lofty grâce. " Exegî monumentum," says Horace; and on that occa- sion he dérides bronze. " Plaudite cives," says I04 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Plautus. Corneille, at sîxty-five years, wîns the love (a tradition in the Escoubleau family) of the very young Marquise de Contades, by promising to send her name down to posterity : — " Lady, to that future race In whose day I '11 hâve some crédit, You '11 be known as fair of face But because my verse has said it."i In the poet and in the artist there is something of the infinité. It is this ingrédient, the infinité, which gives to this kind of genius an irreducible grandeur. This infinité élément in art is independent of progress. It may hâve, and it certainly has, duties to fulfil toward progress ; but it is not dépendent upon it. It is dépendent upon none of the more perfect processes of the future, upon no transfor- mation of language, upon no death or birth of idioms. It has within itself the incommensurable and the innumerable; it can be subdued by no rivalry; it is as pure, as complète, as sidereal, as divine, in the heart of barbarism as in the heart of civilization. It is the beautîful, having the infi- nité variety of genius, but always equal to itself, always suprême. Such is the law, scarcely known, of Art. 1 " Chez cette race nouvelle, Où j'aurai quelque crédit, Vous ne passerez pour belle Qu'autant que je l'aurai dit." WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 105 CHAPTER IV. Science îs différent. The relative, whîch gov- erns it, leaves its impression ; and thèse successive stamps of the relative, more and. more resembling the real, constitute the changing certainty of man. In Science, certain things hâve been masterpieces which are so no more. The hydraulic machine of Marly was a masterpiece. » Science seeks perpétuai motion. She has found it : it is Science herself. Science is continually changing in the benefit she confers. In Science, ail tends to stir, to change, to form fresh surfaces. AU dénies, destroys, créâtes, re- places ail. What was ground yesterday is put into fhe hopper again to-day. The colossal machine. Science, never rests. It is never satis- fied; it is insatiable for improvement, of whîch the absolute knows nothing. Vaccination is called in question, the lightning-rod is called in question. Jenner may hâve erred, Franklin may hâve been mistaken; let us search again. This agitation is noble. Science is restless around man; she has her own reasons. Science plays in progress the part of utility. Let us révérence this superb handmaiden. Science makes discoveries ; Art composes works. Science is an acquirement of man ; Science îs a lo6 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. ladder : one savant mounts above his fellow. Poe- try is a soaring flight. Do you want examples ? They abound. Hère is one, the first which cornes to mind. Jacob Metzu (scientifically Metius) discovers the télescope by chance, as Newton discovered gravita- tion, and Christopher Columbus, America. Let us open a parenthesîs : there is no chance in the création of * The Oresteia * or of * Paradise Lost.* A masterpiece is the offspring of will. After Metzu comes Galileo, who improves the discovery of Metzu; then Kepler, who improves on the îm- provement of Galileo; then Descartes, who, al- though going somewhat astray in takîng a concave glass for eyepiece instead of a convex one, makes fruitful the improvement of Kepler; then the Ca- puchin Reita, who rectifies the reversing of objects ; then Huyghens, who makes a great step by plac- ing the two convex glasses at the focus of the objective; and in less than fifty years, from 1610 to 1659, during the short interval which séparâtes the * Nuncius Sidereus * of Galileo from the * Oculus Eliae et Enoch ' of Father Reita, behold the origi- nal inventor, Metzu, obliterated. And it is con- stantly the same in science. Vegetius was count of Constantinople ; but that did not prevent his tactics being forgotten, — for- gotten like the strategy of Polybius, forgotten like the strategy of Folard. The pig's-head of the pha- lanx and the pointed order of the légion reappeared for a moment, two hundred years ago, in the wedge of Gustavus Adolphus; but in our days, when there are no more pikemen, as in the fourth cen- WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, 107 tury, nor lansquenets, as în the seventeenth, the pondérons trîangular attack, whîch was formerly the basis of ail tactics, is replaced by a swarm of zouaves charging with the bayonet. Some day, sooner perhaps than people think, the bayonet charge will itself be superseded by peace, — at first European, by-and-by universal ; and then the whole military science will vanish away. For that science, improvement lies in disappearance. Science goes on unceasingly erasing itself, — fruitful erasures ! Who knows now what is the Homœomeria of Anaximenes, which perhaps be- longs really to Anaxagoras? Cosmography is notably amended since the time when this same Anaxagoras told Pericles that the sun was almost as large as the Peloponnesus. Many planets, and satellites of planets, hâve been discovered since the four stars of Medicis. Entomology has made some advance since the time when it was asserted that the scarabée was something of a god and a cousin to the sun — first, on account of the thirty toes on îts feet, which correspond to the thirty days of the solar month, secondly, because the scarabée is without a female, like the sun — and the time when Saint Clément of Alexandria, outbidding Plu- tarch, made the remark that the scarabée, like the sun, passes six months on the earth, and six months under it. Would you verify this? Refer to the * Stromata,' paragraph iv. Scholastîcism itself, chi- merical as it is, gives up the * Holy Meadow ' of Moschus, laughs at the *Holy Ladder' of John Climacus, and is àshamed of the century in which Saint Bernard, adding fuel to the pyre which the I08 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Viscounts of Campania wished to put out, called Arnaldo de Brescia " a man wîth the dove's head and the scorpion's taîl." The Cardinal Virtues are no longer the law in anthropology. The Steyardes of the great Arnauld are decayed. However un- certain is meteorology, it is far from discussing now, as it did in the second century, whether a rain which saves an army from dying of thirst is due to the Christian prayers of the Melitine légion or to the pagan intervention of Jupiter Pluvius. The astrol- oger Marcian Posthumus was for Jupiter ; Tertul- lian was for the Melitine légion : no one was for the cloud and the wind. Locomotion, if we go from the antique chariot of Laius to the railway, passing by Ûi^patache^ the track-boat, the turgotincy the diligence, and the mail-coach, has indeed made some progress. The time has gone by for the fa- mous journey from Dijon to Paris, lasting a month ; and we could not understand to-day the amazement of Henry IV., asking of Joseph Scaliger: " Is it true, Monsieur TEscale, that you hâve been from Paris to Dijon without relieving your bowels?" Micrography is now far beyond Leuwenhoeck, who was himself far beyond Swammerdam. Look at the point at which spermatology and ovology hâve already arrîved, and recall Mariana reproaching Ar- naud de Villeneuve (who discovered alcohol and the oil of turpentine) with the strange crime of having attempted human génération in a pumpkin. Grand-Jean de Fouchy, the not over-credulous life- secretary of the Academy of Sciences a hundred years ago, would hâve shaken his head if any one had told hini that from the solar spectrum one WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 109 would pass to the îgneous spectrum, then to the stellar spectrum, and that by aid of the spectrum of fiâmes and of the spectrum of stars would be discovered an entirely new method of grouping the heavenly bodies and what might be called the chemîcal constellations. Orffyreus, who destroyed hîs machine rather than allow the Landgrave of Hesse to see inside it, — Orffyreus, so admired by S*Gravesande, the author of the * Matheseos Uni- versalis Elementa,* — would be laughed at by our mechanicians. A country horse-doctor would not înfiict on horses the remedy with which Galen treated the indigestions of Marcus Aurelius. What is the opinion of the eminent specialists of our times, Desmarres at the head of them, respecting the learned discoveries of the seventeenth century by the Bishop of Titiopolis concerning the nasal chambers? The mummies hâve got on ; M. Gannal makes them differently, if not better, than the Tari- cheutes, the Paraschîstes, and the Cholchytes made them in the days of Herodotus, — the first by washing the body, the second by opening it, and the third by embalming. Five hundred years be- fore Jésus Christ, it was perfectly scientific, when a king of Mesopotamia had a daughter possessed of the devil, to send to Thebes for a god to cure her. It is not exactly our way of treating epilepsy. In the same way we hâve given up expecting the kings of France to cure scrofula. In 371, under Valens, son of Gratian the rope- maker, the judges summoned to the bar a table accused of sorcery. This table had an accomplice named Hilarius. Hilarius confessed the crime. I lO WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. Ammîanus Marcellinus has preserved for us hîs confession, received by Zosimus, count and fiscal advocate. " Construximus, magnifie! judices, ad cortinae sîmilitudinem Delphicae infaustam hanc mensulam quam videtis; movimus tandem." Hi- larius was beheaded. Who was his accuser ? A learned geometrician and magician, the same who advised Valens to decapitate ail those whose names began witli Tkeod, To-day you may call yourself Théodore, and even make a table tip, wîthout the fear of a geometrician causing your head to be eut off. One would very much astonish Solon the son of Execestidas, Zeno the Stoic, Antipater, Eudoxus, Lysis of Tarentum, Cebes, Menedemus, Plato, Epi- curus, Aristotle, and Epimenides, if one were to say to Solon that it is not the moon which régu- lâtes the year ; to Zeno, that it is not proved that the soûl is divided into eight parts ; to Antipater, that the heaven is not formed of five circles; to Eudoxus, that it is not certain that, between the Egyptians embalming the dead, the Romans burn- îng them, and the Paeonians throwing them into ponds, the Paeonians are those who are right ; to Lysis of Tarentum, that it is not correct that the sight is a hot vapor ; to Cebes, that ît is false that the princîple of the éléments is the oblong tri- angle and the isosceles triangle ; to Menedemus, that it is not true that, in order to know the secret bad intentions of men, it suffices to stick on one's head an Arcadian hat decorated with the twelve signs of the zodiac ; to Plato, that sea-water does not cure ail diseases; to Epicurus, that matter is WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, 1 1 1 înfinîtely divisible ; to Aristotle, that the fifth élé- ment has not an orbicular movement, for the reason that there îs no fifth élément ; to Epîmenides, that the plague cannot be infallibly got rid of by letting black and white sheep go at random, and sacrificîng to unknown gods în the places where the sheep happen to stop. If you should try to hint to Pythagoras how improbable it îs that he should hâve been wounded at the siège of Troy — he, Pythagoras — by Men- elaus, two hundred and seven years before his birth, he would reply that the fact îs incontestable, and that it îs proved by the fact that he perfectly recognizes, as having already seen it, the shield of Menelaus suspended under the statue of Apollo at Branchidae, although entîrely rotted away, ex- cept the ivory face ; that at the siège of Troy his own name was Euphorbus, and that before being Euphorbus he was iEthalides, son of Mercury, and that after havîng been Euphorbus he was Her- motimus, then Pyrrhus, fisherman at Delos, then Pythagoras ; that it îs ail évident and clear, — as clear as that he was présent the same day and the same minute at Metapontum and at Crotona, as évident as that by writing with blood on a mirror exposed to the moon one may see in the moon what one wrote on the mirror ; and lastly, that he îs Pythagoras, living at Metapontum, in the Street of the Muses, the inventor of the multiplication- table and of the square of the hypothenuse, the greatest of mathematicians, the father of exact science ; and that as for you, you are an imbécile. Chrysîppus of Tarsus, who lîved about the 1 1 2 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. hundred and thîrtîeth olympîad, forms an era în science. This philosopher (the same who dîed — actually died — of laughter caused by seeing a don- key eat figs out of a silver basin) had studied everything, gone to the bottom of everythîng, and had written seven hundred and five volumes, of which three hundred and eleven were of dialectics, without having dedicated a single one to a kîng, — a fact which astounds Diogenes Laertius. He con- densed în his brain ail human knowledge. Hîs contemporaries named him " Light." Chrysîppus signifying " golden horse," they said that he had got detached from the chariot of the sun. He had taken for device ** TO ME/* He knew înnu- merable things; among others, thèse, — the earth îs flat ; the universe is round and litnited ; the best food for man îs human flesh; the community of wîves is the basis of social order ; the father ought to espouse his daughter; there îs a word which kills the serpent, a word which tames the bear, a word which arrests the flight of eagles, and a word which drives the cattle from the bean-field; by pronouncîng from hour to hour the three names of the Egyptian Trinity, Amon-Mouth-KhonSy An- dron of Argos contrived to cross the déserts of Libya without drinking; coffins ought not to be made of cypress wood, the sceptre of Jupiter being made of that wood ; Themistoclea, priestess of Delphi, had given birth to children, yet remained a vîrgîn ; the just alone having authority to swear, Jupiter very properly receives the name of " The Swearer ; " the phœnix of Arabia and the moths lîve in the fire ; the earth is carried by the air as WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, 1 1 3 by a car ; the sun drînks from the océan, and the moon from the rivers. For thèse reasons the Athe- nians raîsed a statue to him on the Ceramicus, with this inscription : " To Chrysippus, who knew everythîng." At very nearly the same time Sophocles wrote * Œdipus Rex.' And Aristotle believed in the story about An- dron of Argos, and Plato in the social prînciple of the community of wives, and Gorgisippus in the earth's being flat, and Epicurus admitted as a fact that the earth was supported by the air, and Her- modamantes that magie words mastered the ox and the eagle and the bear and the serpent, and Echecrates believed in the immaculate maternity of Themistoclea, and Pythagoras in Jupiter's scep- tre made of cypress wood, and Posidonîus in the océan affording drink to the sun and the rîvers quenching the thirst of the moon, and Pyrrho in the moths living in fire. Except in this one particular, Pyrrho was a sceptic. He made up for his belief in that by doubting everything else. Such is the long groping course of Science. Cuvier was mistaken yesterday, Lagrange the day before yesterday; Leibnitz before Lagrange, Gas- sendi before Leibnitz, Cardan before Gassendi, Cornélius Agrippa before Cardan, Averroës, before Agrippa, Plotinus before Averroës, Artemidorus Daldian before Plotinus, Posidonius before Ar- temidorus, Democritus before Posidonius, Em- pedocles before Democritus, Carneades before Empedocles, Plato before Carneades, Pherecydes % 1 14 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. before Plato, Pittacus before Pherecydes, Thaïes before Pittacus ; and before Thaïes, Zoroaster, and before Zoroaster, Sanchoniathon, and before San- choniathon, Hermès: Hermès, which signifies science, as Orpheus signifies art. O wonderful marvel, this mount swarming with dreams which engender the real ! O sacred errors, slow, blind, and saînted mothers of truth ! Some savants, such as Kepler, Euler, 'Geoffroy St. Hilaire, Arago, hâve brought into science nothing but light; they are rare. At times Science is an obstacle to Science ; the savants give way to scruples, and cavil at study. Pliny îs scandalized at Hipparchus; Hipparchus, with the aid of an imperfect astrolabe, tries to count the stars and to name them, — "A deed evil in the sight of God," says Pliny (Ausus rem Deo improbam). To count the stars is to commit a sîn toward God. This accusation, started by Pliny against Hipparchus, is continued by the Inquisition against Campanella. . Science is the asymptote of truth ; it approaches unceasingly, and never touches. Nevertheless, it has every kind of greatness. It has will, précision, enthusiasm, profound attention, pénétration, shrewd- ness, strength, patience in concaténation, permanent watchfulness of phenomena, the ardor of progress, and even fits of bravery. Witness La Pérouse ; witness Pilastre des Rosiers ; witness Sir John Franklin ; witness Jacquemont ; witness Living- stone; witness Mazet; witness, at this very hour, Nadar. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, 1 1 5 But Science îs séries. It proceeds by proofs superposed one above the other, whose obscure stratification rises slowly to the level of Truth. Art has nothing like it. Art is not successive. AU Art is ensemble. Let us sum up thèse few pages. Hippocrates is outrun, Archimedes îs outrun, Aratus. is outrun, Avicennus is outrun, Paracelsus is outrun, Nicholas Flamel is outrun, Ambroise Paré is outrun, Vesalius is outrun, Copernicus is outrun, Galileo is outrun. Newton is outrun, Clair- aut is outrun, Lavoisier is outrun, Montgolfier is outrun, Laplace is outrun. Pindar is not, Phidias is not Pascal the savant is outrun; Pascal the writer is not. We no longer teach the astronomy of Ptolemy, the geography of Strabo, the climatology of Cleostratus, the zoôlogy of Pliny, the algebra of Diophantus, the medicinQ of Tribunus, the surgery of Ronsil, the dialectics of Sphœrus, the myology of Sténo, the uranology of Tatius, the stenography of Trithemius, the pisciculture of Sebastien de Medicis, the arithmetic of Stifels, the geometry of Tartaglia, the chronology of Scalîger, the meteor- ology of Stoffler, the anatomy of Gassendi, the pathology of Fernel, the jurisprudence of Robert Barmne, the agronomy of Quesnay, the hydrog- raphy of Bouguer, the navigation of Bourde de Villehuet, the ballistics of Gribeauval, the veter- înary practice of Garsault, the architectonics of Desgodets, the botany of Tournefort, the scho- lasticism of Abelard, the politics of Plato, the 1 16 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, mechanics of Aristotle, the physics of Descartes, the theology of StilHngfleet. We taught yesterday, we teach to-day, we shall teach to-morrow, we shall teach forever, the " Sing, goddess, the wrath of Achilles." Poetry lîves a potentîal life. The sciences may extend its sphère, not încrease îts power. Homer had but four winds for his tempests; Virgil who has twelve, Dante who has twenty-four, Milton who has thirty-two, do not make theîr storms grander. And it is probable that the tempests of Orpheus were as beautiful as those of Homer, although Orpheus had, to raise the waves, but two winds, the Phœnicias and the Aparctias ; that îs to say, the south wind and the north wind, — often con- founded, by the way, with the Argestes, the west wind of summer, and the Libs^ the west wind of winter. Religions die away, and in dying bequeath a great artist to other religions coming after them. Serpio makes for the Venus Aversative of Athens a vase which the Holy Virgin accepts from Venus, and which serves to-day as a baptismal urn at Notre Dame of Gaëta. eternity of Art ! A man, a corpse, a shade from the depth of the past, stretching a hand across the centuries, lays hold of you. 1 remember one day of my youth, at Romorantîn, in a hut we had there, with its vîne-trellis through which the air and light sifted in, that I espied a book upon a shelf, the only book there was in the house, — Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, My pro- WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 1 1 7 fessors of rhetoric had spoken very ill of ît, — a circumstance which recommended ît to me. I opened the book. It must hâve been at that moment about noonday. I happened on thèse powerful and serene verses : ^ " Religion does not consist in turning unceasingly toward the veiled stone, nor in approachîng ail the altars, nor in throwing one's self prostrate on the ground, nor in raising the hands before the habitations of gods, nor in deluging the temples with the blood of beasts, nor in heaping vows upon vows; but in beholding ail with a peaceful soûl." I stopped in thought; then I began to read again. Some moments afterward I could see nothing, hear nothing; I was immersed in the poet At the dinner-hour, I made a sign that I was not hungry ; and at sunset, when the flocks were returning to their folds, I was still in the same place, reading the wonderful book ; and by my side, my white- haired father, indulgent to my prolonged reading, was seated on the door-sill of the low room where his sword hung on a nail, and was gently calling the sheep, which came one after another to eat a little sait in the hoUow of his hand. 1 Nec pietas ulla est, velatum saepe videri Vertier ad lapidera, atque omnes accedere ad aras, Nec procumbere humi prostratum, et pandere palmas Ante deum delubra, neque aras sanguine multo Spargere quadrupedum, nec votis nectere vota; Sed mage placata posse omnia mente tu^L <>'' 1 1 8 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. CHAPTER V. POETRY cannot grow less. Why? Because ît cannot grow greater. Those words, so often used, even by the let- tered, "décadence," " renascence," show to what an extent the essence of Art is unknown, Super- ficial intellects, easily becomîng pedantic, take for renascence or décadence some effects of juxta- position, some optical mirage, some event in the history of a language, some ebb and flow of ideas, ail the vast movement of création and thought, the resuit of which is universal Art. This movement is the very work of the Infinité passing through the human brain. Phenomena are seen only from the culminatîng point, and poetry thusViewed is immanent. There is neither rise nor décline in Art. Human genius is always at its fuU; ail the rain of heaven adds not a drop of water to the océan. A tide is an illusion ; water ebbs on one shore, only to rise on another. Oscillations are taken for diminutions. To say "there will be no more poets," is to say " there will never be flood-tide again." Poetry is elemental. It is irreducible, incorrup- tible, and refractory to manipulation. Like the sea, it says on each occasion ail ît has to say; then it begins anew with a tranquil majesty, and with the inexhaustible variety which belongs only WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 1 19 to unity. This diversîty in what seems monoto- nous îs the marvel of immensity. Wave upon wave, billow after billow, foam behînd foam, movement, and again movement. The Iliad is moving away, the Romancero cornes ; the Bible sînks, the Koran surges up; after the aquilon Pîndar cornes the hurricane Dante. Does ever- lasting poetry repeat itself ? No. It îs the same, and it is différent; the same breath, a différent Sound. Do you take the Cid for a plagiarîst of Ajax? Do you take Charlemagne for a copier of Aga- memnon? **There îs nothing new under the sun.*' " Your novelty is the répétition of the old," etc. Oh, the strange process of criticism ! Then Art is but a séries of counterfeits ! Thersites has a thief, — Falstaff. Orestes has an ape, — Hamlet. The Hippogriff is the jay of Pegasus. Ali thèse poets ! A crew of cheats ! They pillage each other, and there *s an end. Inspiration is involved with swin- dling. Cervantes plunders Apuleius, Alceste cheats Timon of Athens. The Smynthian Wood is the Forest of Bondy. Out of whose pocket was Shake- speare seen to draw his hand ? Out of the pocket of iEschylus. No ! neither décadence, nor renascence, nor plagîarism, nor répétition, nor imitation. Identity of heart, différence of spirit; that is ail. Each great artist, as we hâve already said, stamps Art anew- in his own image. Hamlet is Orestes in the image of Shakespeare ; Figaro is Scapin in the image of Beaumarchais ; Grangousîer îs Silenus in the image of Rabelais. I20 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. With the new poet everything begîns anew, and at the same time nothing is interrupted. Each new genius îs an abyss. Nevertheless, tradition exists. Tradition from abyss to abyss, such is — in Art, as in the firmament — the mystery; and men of genius communicate by their effluence, like the stars. What hâve they in common? Nothing. Everything. From the pit that is called Ezekiel to the préci- pice that îs called Juvenal, there is no interruption of continuity for the thinker. Lean over this anath- ema, or over that satire, and the same vertigo is whirling around both. The Apocalypse is reflected from the Polar Sea of Ice, and you hâve that aurora borealis, the Nibelungen. The Edda replies to the Vedas. Hence this, — our starting-point, to which we return, — Art is not perfectible. No possible décline for poetry, nor any possible împrovement. We lose our time when we say: Nesdo quid majus nascitur Iliade, Art is subject neither to diminution nor to énlargement. Art has its seasons, its clouds, its éclipses, — even its stains, which are perhaps splendors; its interpo- sitions of sudden opacity, for which it is not re- sponsible : but in the end it brings light into the human soûl always with the same intensity. It re- mains the same furnace, emitting the same auroral glow. Homer does not grow cold. Let us insist, moreover, upon this, inasmuch as the rivalry of intelligences îs the life of the beautî- ful : O poets ! the first rank îs ever free. Let us remove everything which may disconcert darîng WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, 121 mînds and break their wîngs. Art is a specîes of valor. To deny that men of genius yet to corne may be the peers of men of genius of the past, would be to deny the ever-working power of God. Yes, and often do we return, and shall return again, to this needed encouragement. Stimulation is almost création. Yes, those men of genius who cannot be surpassed may be equalled. How? By beîng différent. BOOK IV. THE ANCIENT SHAKESPEARE. CHAPTER I. THE ancîent Shakespeare îs iEschylus. Let us return to -^schylus. He is the grandsîre of the stage. This book would be incomplète if iEschylus had not his separate place in it. A man whom we do not know how to class in his own century, so little does he belong to it, being at the same time so much behind it and so much in advance of it, the Marquis de Mirabeau, — that ugly customer as a philanthropist, but a very rare thinker after ail, — had à book-case, at the two corners of which he had caused a dog and a she-goat to be carved, in remembrance of Socra- tes, who swore by the dog, and of Zeno, who swore by the goat. His library presented this peculiarity : on one sîde there were Hesiod, Sophocles, Euripides, Plato, Herodotus, Thucydides, Pindar, Theocritus, Anacreon, Theophrastus, Demosthenes, Plutarch, Cicero, Titus Livius, Seneca, Persius, Lucan, Terence, Horace, Ovid, Propertius, TibuUus, Virgil; and underneath could be read, engraved in letters of gold: "Amo." On the other side WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, 123 stood iEschylus alone, and underneath thîs word : " TiMEO." iEschylus în realîty îs formidable. He cannot be apprpached wîthout trembling. He bas magni- tude and mystery. Barbarous, extravagant, em- phatîc, antîthetical, bombastic, absurd, — such îs the judgment passed on hîm by the officiai rhetorîc of the présent day. This rhetoric will be changed. iEschylus is one of those men whom superficial crîticism scoffs at or dîsdains, but whom the true critic approaches with a sort of sacred fear. The fear of genius îs the beginning of taste. In the true critic there is always a poet, be ît but în the latent state. Whoever does not understand iEschylus îs îrre- medîably commonplace. iEschylus îs the touch- stone of the intelligence. The drama îs a strange form of art. Its diameter measures from 'The Seven agaînst Thebes' to *The Philosopher Wîthout Knowing it/ and from Brid'oison to Œdipus. Thyestes forms part of it ; Turcaret also. If you wish to define it, put înto your définition Electra and Marton. The drama îs disconcerting ; it baffles the weak. Thîs comes from its ubiquity. The drama has every horizon ; you may then imagine its capacity. The drama has been capable of absorbing the epic ; and the resuit is that marvellous literary novelty, which îs at the same time a social power, — the romance. The romance îs bronze, an amalgamation of the epîc, lyrîc, and dramatic. * Don Quîxote * îs ilîad, ode, and comedy. 124 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. Such îs the expansion of whîch the drama îs capable. The drama îs the vastest réservoir of art, spacious enough for both God and Satan : witness Job. From ;the vîew-poînt of absolute art, the charac- teristîc of the epîc poem îs grandeur ; the charac- teristîc of the drama, vastness. The vast dîffers from the great în thîs: that ît excludes, îf ît chooses, dîmensîon ; that " ît îs beyond measure," as the common sayîng îs ; and that ît can, without losing beauty, lose proportion. It îs harmonious like the Milky Way. It îs by vastness that the drama begins, four thousand years ago, în Job, whom we hâve just recalled, and, two thousand five hundred years ago, in iEschylus ; ît îs by vastness that ît continues in Shakespeare. What person- ages does iEschylus take? Volcanoes: one of his lost tragédies îs called * iEtna ; ' then the moun- tains : Caucasus with Prometheus ; then the sea : the Océan on its dragon, and the waves, the Oceanides ; then the vast Orient : ' The Persians ; ' then the bottomless darkness: *The Eumenîdes.' iEschylus proves the man by the giant. In Shakespeare the drama approaches nearer to humanity, but remains colossal. Macbeth seems a polar Atrides. You see that the drama re- veals Nature, then reveals the soûl; and there is no limit to thîs horizon. The drama îs life, and lîfe îs everythîng. The epic poem can be only great ; the drama îs constraîned to be vast. Thîs vastness pervades iEschylus and Shake- speare throughout. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 125 The vast, în iEschylus, îs a wîU. It îs also a tempérament. iEschylus învents the buskîn, whîch makes the man taller, and the mask, which încreases the voice. His metaphors are enormous. He calles Xerxes " the man with the dragon eyes." The sea, whîch îs a plaîn for so many poets, îs for iEschylus "a forest" (a\ See the beginning of the preceding chapter.— Tr. 212 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, worst cases that serious aesthetics ever had to regulate. Shakespeare îs fertilîty, force, exubérance, the swelling breast, the foaming cup, the brimming trough, sap în excess, lava in torrents, the univer- sal rain of life, everything by thousands, everything by millions, no réticence, no ligature, no economy, the inordinate and tranquil prodigality of the Creator. To those who fumble in the bottom of their pockets, the inexhaustible seems insane. Will it stop soon? Never. Shakespeare is the sower of dazzling wonders. At every turn, an image; at every turn, contrast; at every turn, light and darkness. The poet, we hâve said, is Nature. Subtle, minute, keen, microscopical like Nature, and yet vast. Not discreet, not reserved, not parsimoni- ous; magnificently simple. Let us explain this Word " simple." Sobriety in poetry is poverty; simplicity îs grandeur. To give to each thing the quantity of space which fits it, neither more nor less: this îs simplicity. Simplicity is justice. The whole law of taste is in that. Each thing put in its own place and spoken with its own word. On the sin- gle condition that a certain latent equilibrium is maintained and a certain mysterious proportion is preserved, simplicity may be found in the most stupendous complication, either in the style or in the ensemble. Thèse are the arcana of great art. The higher criticîsm alone, which takes its starting- poînt from enthusiasra, pénétrâtes and compre- hends thèse profound laws. Opulence, profusion, WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, 213 dâzzling radiancy, may be simplicity. The sun îs simple. Such simplîcity evidently does not resemble the simplicity recommended by Le Batteux, the Abbé d'Aubignac, and Father Bouhours. Whatever may be the abundance, whatever may be the entanglement, even were ît perplexing, con- fused, and inextricable, ail that is true is simple. The only form of simplicity recognized by Art îs the simplicity that îs profound. Simplicity, being true, is artless. Artlessness îs the countenance of truth. Shakespeare îs simple in the grand manner ; he îs infatuated with ît : but petty simplicity is unknown to him. The simplicity which is impotence, the simpli- city which is meagreness, the simplicity which îs short-winded, is a case for pathology. A hospital ticket suits it better than a ride on the hippogriff. I admit that the hump of Thersites îs simple; but the pectoral muscles of Hercules are simple also. I prefer this simplicity to the other. The simplicity proper to ^poetry may be as bushy as the oak. Does the oak happen to pro- duce on you the effect of a Byzantine and of a délicate being? Its innumerable antithèses, — gigantic trunk and small leaves, rough bark and vélvet mosses, absorption of rays and lavishness of shade, crowns for heroes and mast for swine, — are they marks of affectation, corruption, subtlety, and bad taste? Could the oak be too witty? could the oak belong to the Hôtel Rambouillet? could the oak be a finical prude? could the oak be taînted with Gongorism ? could the oak belong to an âge 214 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, of décadence? Is it possible that ail sîmplicity, sancta simplicitaSy is concentrated in the cabbage? Refinement, excess of wit, aflfectation, Gongorism, — ail that has been hurled at Shakespeare's head. They say that thèse are the faults of littleness, and they hasten to reproach the gîant with them. But then this Shakespeare respects nothing; he goes straight on, putting aut of breath those who wish to follow him. He strides over proprietîes, he overthrows Aristotle, he spreads havoc among the Jesuits, the Methodists, the Purists, and the Puritans; he puts Loyola to disorderly rout, and upsets Wesley; he is valiant, bold, enterprising, militant, direct. His inkstand smokes like a crater. He is always laborious, ready, spirited, disposed, pressing forward. Pen in hand, his brow blazing, he goes on, driven by the démon of genius. The stallion is over-demonstrative ; there are jack- mules passing by, to whom this is displeasing. To be prolific is to be aggressive. A poet like Isaiah, like Juvenal, like Shakespeare, is, in truth, exorbi- tant. By ail that is holy, some attention ought to be paid to others; one man has no right to everything! What! virility always, inspiration everywhere; as many metaphors as the meadow, as many antithèses as the oak, as many contrasts and depths as the unîverse ; incessant génération, pubescence, hymen, gestation; a vast unity with exquisite and robust détail, living communion, fe- cundation, plénitude, production ! It is too much ; ît infringes the rights of neuters. For nearly three centuries Shakespeare, this poet ail brimming with virility, has been looked WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, 21 5 upon by sober critics with that discontented air which certain bereaved spectators must hâve in the seraglio. Shakespeare has no reserve, no restraînt, no limit, no blank. What is wanting in him is that he wants nothing. He needs no savings-bank. He does not keep Lent. He overflows like végétation, like germination, like light, like flame. Yet thîs does not hinder him from thinking of you, specta- tor or reader, from preachîng to you, from giving you advice, from being your friend, like the first good-natured La Fontaine you meet, and from rendering you small services. You can warm your hands at the conflagration he kindles. Othello, Romeo, lago, Macbeth, Shylock, Rich- ard IIL, Julius Caesar, Oberon, Puck, Ophelia, Desdemona, Juliet, Titania, men, women, witches, fairies, soûls, — Shakespeare is the grand dis- tributor ; take, take, take, ail of you ! Do you want more ? Hère is Ariel, ParoUes, Macduff, Prospero, Viola, Miranda, Caliban. More yet ? Hère is Jessica, Cordelia, Cressida, Portia, Braban- tio, Polonius, Horatio, Mercutio, Imogen, Panda- rus of Troy, Bottom, Theseus. Ecce Deus ! It is the poet, he offers himself : who will hâve me ? He gives, scatters, squanders himself ; he is nêver empty. Why ? He cannot be. Exhaustion is impossible with him. In him is something of the fathomless. He fiUs up again, and spends himself; then recommences. He is the spendthrift of genius. In license and audacity of language Shakespeare equals Rabelais, whom, a few days ago, a swan-like 2l6 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. Like ail lofty mînds in full rîot of omnipotence, Shakespeare decants ail Nature, drinks ît, and makes you drink it. Voltaire reproached him for his drunkenness; and was quite right Why on earth, we repeat, why has this Shakespeare such a tempérament? He does not stop, he does not feel fatigue, he is without pity for the poor weak stom- achs that are candidates for the Academy. The gastritis called " good taste '* does not afflict him. He is powerful. What is this vast intemperate song that he sings through the centuries — war- song, drinking-song, love-ditty — which passes from King Lear to Queen Mab, and from Hamlet to Falstaff, heart-rending at times as a sob, grand as the Iliad? "I am stiflf ail over from reading Shakespeare," said M. Auger. His poetry has the sharp tang of honey made by the vagabond hiveless bee. Hère prose, there verse ; ail forms, being but réceptacles for the idea, suit him. This poetry mourns and jests. The English tongue, a language little formed, now serves, now hinders him ; but everywhere the deep mind makes itself seen and felt. Shakespeare's drama moves forward with a kind of distracted rhythm ; it is so vast that it staggers ; it has and gives the vertigo: but nothing is so solid as this palpitating grandeur. Shakespeare, shuddering, has within himself winds, spirits, magie potions, vibrations ; he sways in the passing breeze, obscure effluences pervade him, he is filled with the un- known sap of life. Thence his agitation, at the core of which is peace. It is this agitation which is lacking in Goethe, wrongly praised for his im- WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 21/ passiveness, which îs înferîority. AU minds of the first order hâve this agitation. It is in Job, in ^Es- chylus, in Alighieri. This agitation is humanity. On earth the divine must be human. It must pro- pose to itself its own riddle, and be distressed by it Inspiration being a miracle, a sacred stupor min- gles with it A certain majesty of mind resembles solitude and is blended with wonder. Shakespeare, like ail great poets, like ail great things, is ab- sorbed by a dream. His own végétation dismays him; his own tempest appals him. It seems at times as if Shakespeare terrified Shakespeare. He shudders at his own depth. This is the sign of suprême intelligence. It is his own vastness which shakes him and imparts to him strange and mighty oscillations. There is no genius without billows. An intoxicated savage, it may be. He has the savagery of the virgin forest ; he has the intoxica- tion of the high sea. Shakespeare — the condor alone gives some idea of such gigantic flight — départs, arrives, starts again, mounts, descends, hovers, sinks, dives, drops, submerges himself in the depths below, merges into the depths above. He is one of those ge- niuses that God purposely leaves unbridled, so that they may go headlong and in fuU flight into the infinité. From time to time there cornes to this globe one of thèse spirits. Their passage, as we hâve said, renews art, science, philosophy, or society. They fill a century, then disappear. Then it is not one century alone that their light illumines, it îs humanity from the beginning to the end of time ; 2l8 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, and we perceive that each of thèse men was the human mind itself contained whole in one brain, and coming, at a given moment, to impart new impetus to earthly progress. Thèse suprême spirits, their life ended and their work done, in death rejoin the mysterious group of those who are at home in the infinité. BOOK IL SHAKESPEARE.— HIS WORK. — THE CULMI- NATING POINTS. CHAPTER I. THE characteristîc of men of genius of the first order is to produce each a peculiar model of man. AU bestow on humanity its portrait, — some laughîng, some weeping, others pensive ; thèse last are the greatest. Plautus laughs, and gives to man Amphitryon; Rabelais laughs, and gives to man Gargantua; Cervantes laughs, and gives to man Don Quixote; Beaumarchais laughs, and gives to man Figaro; Molière weeps, and gives to man Alceste; Shakespeare dreams, and gives to man^ Hamlet; ^Eschylus méditâtes, and gives to man Prometheus. The others are great ; iEschylus and Shakespeare are vast. Thèse portraits of humanity (left to humanity as a last farewell by those passing spirits, the poets) are rarely flattering, always exact, — likenesses of profound resemblance. Vice, or folly, or virtue îs extracted from the soûl and stamped upon the visage. The tear congealed, bccomes a pearl ; the 220 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. smîle petrîfied, at last appears a menace ; wrinkles are the furrows of wisdom ; certain frowns are tragic. This séries of models of man is a perma- nent lesson for the générations : each century adds în some figures, sometimes done in full light and strong relief, like Macette, Célimène, Tartuffe, Tur- caret, and Rameau's Nephew; sometimes simple profiles, like Gil Blas, Manon Lescaut, Clarissa Harlowe, and Candide. God créâtes by intuition ; man créâtes by inspi- ration, strengthened by observation. This second création, which is nothing else but divine action carried out by man, is what is called ** genius." The poet stepping into the place of destiny ; an invention of men and events so strange, so true to nature, and so masterly that certain religious sects hold it in horror as an encroachment upon Provi- dence, and call the poet " the liar ; " the conscience of man taken in the act and placed in surroundings which it resists, governs, or transforms : such is the drama. And there is in this something suprême. This handling of the human soûl seems a kind of equality with God : equality, the mystery of which îs explained when we reflect that God is within man. This equality is identity. Who is our con- science? He ; and He counsels rîght action. Who îs our intelligence? He ; and He inspires the masterpiece. God may be there; but this, as we hâve seen, does not lessen the crabbedness of critics: the greatest minds are the ones most called in ques- tion. It even sometimes happens that real in- telligences attack genius; the inspired, strangcly WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, 221 enough, do not recognize* inspiration. Erasmus, Bayle, Scaliger, St. Evremond, Voltaire, many of the Fathers of the Church, whole families of phi- losophers, the whole Alexandrian School, Cicero, Horace, Lucian, Plutarch, Josephus, Dion Chryso- stom, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Philostratus, Metrodorus of Lampsacus, Plato, Pythagoras, hâve severely criticised Homer. In this enumeration we omit Zoïlus. Men who deny are not critics. Hatred is not intelligence. To insuit is not to discuss. Zoïlus, Maevius, Cecchi, Greeii, Avella- neda, William Lauder, Visé, Fréron, — no cleansing of thèse names is possible. Thèse men hâve wounded the human race in her men of genius ; thèse wretched hands forever retain the color of the mud that they hâve thrown. Nor hâve thèse men even the misérable renown that they seem to hâve amply earned, nor the whole quantity of infamy that they had hoped for. It is scarcely known that they hâve existed. They are half forgotten, — a greater humiliation than to be whoUy forgotten. With the exception of two or three among them who hâve become by-words of contempt, despicable owls nailed up for a warn- ing, ail the wretched names are unknown. An obscure notoriety foUows their equivocal existence. Look at that Clément who called himself the " hy- percritic," and whose profession it was to bîte and denounce Diderot; he disappears, and is con- founded, although born at Geneva, with Clément of Dijon, confessor to Mesdames; with David Clément, author of the * Bibliothèque Curieuse ' ; with Clément of Baize, Bénédictine of St. Maur; 222 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. and wîth Clément d'Ascaîn, Capuchîn, definitor and provincial of Béarn. What avails ît him to hâve declared that the work of Diderot is but " obscure verbiage," and to hâve died mad at Cha- renton, to be afterward submerged in four or five unknown Cléments? In vain did Famien Strada rabidly attack Tacitus : he is scarcely distinguished now from Famien Spada, called " the Wooden Sword," the jester of Sigismond Augustus. In vain did Cecchî vilify Dante: we are not certain that his name was not Cecco. In vain did Green fasten on Shakespeare : he is now confounded with Greene.^ Avellaneda, the ** enemy " of Cervantes, is perhaps Avellanedo. Lauder, the slanderer of Milton, is perhaps Leuder. The unknown De Visé, who " smashed " Molière, turns out to be a certain Donneau ; he had surnamed himself De Visé through a taste for nobility. Those men relied, in order to create for themselves a little notoriety, on the greatness of those whom they outraged. But no ; they hâve remained obscure. Thèse poor insulters did not get their wages ; they are bank- rupt of contempt. Let us pity them. ^ And rightly ; for he is indeed the same individual. See note, p. 190. — Tr. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 223 CHAPTER IL Let us add that calumny's labor is lost. Then what purpose can it serve? Not even an evil one. Do you know anything more useless than the inju- rious which does not injure? Better still. This injury is bénéficiai. In good tîme it is found that calumny, envy, and hatred, thinking to work harm, hâve worked benefit. Their insults bring famé; their blackening adds lustre. They succeed only in mingling with glory an outcry which increases it. Let us continue. Thus each great poet tries on in his turn this immense human mask. And such is the strength of the soûl which shines through the mysterious aperture of the eyes, that this look changes the mask, and from terrible makes it comic, then pen- sive, then grieved, then young and smiling, then décrépit, then sensual and gluttonous, then relig- ions, then outrageons ; and it is Gain, Job, Atreus, Ajax, Priam, Hecuba, Niobe, Clytemnestra, Nausî- caa, Pistoclerus, Grumio, Davus, Pasicompsa, Chi- mène, Don Arias, Don Diego, Mudarra, Richard IIL, Lady Macbeth, Desdemona, Juliet, Romeo, Lear, Sancho Panza, Pantagruel, Panurge, Ar- nolphe, Dandin, Sganarelle, Agnes, Rosine, Victo- rine, Basile, Almavîva, Chérubin, Manfred. From the direct divine création proceeds Adam, the prototype. From the indirect divine création 224 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. — that îs to say, from the human création — pro- ceed other Adams, the types. A type does not reproduce any man în partîcu- lar; it cannot be exactly superposed upon any îndividual ; it sums up and concentrâtes under one human form a whole family of characters and minds. A type is no abridgment : it is a conden- sation. It is not one, it îs ail. Alcibiades îs but Alcibiades, Petronius îs but Petronius, Bassom- pierre is but Bassompierre, Buckingham is but Buckingham, Fronsac is but Fronsac, Lauzun is but Lauzun ; but take Lauzun, Fronsac, Bucking- ham, Bassompierre, Petronius, and Alcibiades, and bray them in the mortar of the dream, and there issues from it a phantom more real than them ail, — Don Juan. Take usurers îndividually, and no one of them îs that fierce merchant of Venice, crying: "Go, Tubal, fee me an officer, bespeak him a fortnight before ; I will hâve the heart of him if he forfeif Take ail the usurers together, from the crowd of them is evolved a total, — Shylock. Sum up usury, you hâve Shylock. The metaphor of the people, who are never mistaken, confirms una- wares the invention of the poet ; and while Shake- speare makes Shylock, the popular tongue créâtes the bloodsucker.^ Shylock is the embodiment of Jewishness; he is also Judaism, — that is to say, his whole nation, the high as well as the low, faith as well as fraud ; and it is because he sums up a whole race, such as oppression has made it, that Shylock is great. The Jews are, however, right in saying that none of them — not even the mediaeval 1 Happe-chair; literally, *'grab-flesh."r-TR. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 225 Jew — îs Shylock. Men of pleasure may wîth rea- son say that no one of them îs Don Juan. No leaf of the orange-tree when chewed gives the flavor of the orange ; yet there îs a deep affinîty, an îdentîty of roots, a sap rising from the same source, a shar- îng of the same subterranean shadow before lîfe. The fruit contains the mystery of the tree, and the type contaîns the mystery of the man. Hence the strange vitality of the type. For — and this is the marvel — the type lives. Were it but an abstraction, men would not recog- nîze ît, and would allow this shadow to go its way. The tragedy termed "classic" makes phantoms; the drama créâtes living types. A lesson whîch îs a man ; a myth with a human face so plastic that ît looks at you and that its look îs a mîrror; a para- ble which nudges you ; a symbol whîch cries out " Beware ! " an idea which îs nerve, muscle, and flesh, — whîch has a heart to love, bowels to suffer, eyes to weep, and teeth to devour or to laugh; a psychical conception wîth the relief of actual fact, whîch, if it be pricked, bleeds red, — such is the type. O power of ail poetry! Thèse types are beings. They breathe, they pal- pitate, their steps are heard on the floor, they exist. They exist with an existence more intense than that of any créature thinking hîmself alive there in the street. Thèse phantoms are more substantial than man. In their essence îs that eternal élément which belongs to masterworks, whîch makes Trîmalchio lîve, whîle M. Romieu is dead. Types are cases foreseen of God ; genîus realîzes 226 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, them. It seems that God prefers to teach man a lesson through man, in order to inspire confidence. The poet walks the street with living men ; he has their ear. Hence the efficacy of types. Man is a premise, the type the conclusion ; God créâtes the phenomenon, genius gives it a name ; God créâtes the miser only, genius forms Harpagon; God créâtes the traitor only, genius makes lago ; God créâtes the coquette, genius makes Célimène; God créâtes the citizen only, genius makes Chry- sale; God créâtes the king only, genius makes Grandgousier. Sometimes, at a given moment, the type issues full-growh from some unknown collaboration of the mass of the people with a great natural actor, an involuntary and powerful realizer ; the crowd is a midwife ; in an epoch whîch bears at one extrême Talleyrand, and at another Chodruc-Duclos, there springs up sud- denly, in a ^ash of lightning, under the mysterious incubation of the théâtre, that spectre Robert Macaire.^ Types go and come on a common level in Art and in Nature ; they are the idéal realized. The good and the evil of man are in thèse figures. From each of them springs, in the eyes of the thinker, a humanity. As we hâve said before, as many types, as many Adams. The man of Homer, Achilles, is an Adam : from him comes the species of the slayers ; the man of iEschylus, Prometheus, is an Adam : from him comes the race of the wrestlers; the 1 For an entertaining account o£ Chodruc-Duclos, by Dr. Holmes, see *The Atlantic Monthly,' July, 1886, pp. 12, 13.— Tr. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 22/ man of Shakespeare, Hamlet, îs an Adam : to hîm belongs the famîly of the dreamers. Other Adams, created by poets, incarnate, — this one, passion; another, duty; another, reason; another, con- science ; another, the fall ; another, the ascension. Prudence, drifting into trépidation, passes from the old man Nestor to the old man Géronte. Love, drifting into appetite, passes from Daphne to Love- lace. Beauty, entwined with the serpent, passes from Eve to Melusina. The types begin in Gene- sis, and a link of their chain passes through Restif de la Bretonne and Vadé. The lyric suits them, — Billingsgate does not misbecome them. They speak a country dialect by the mouth of Gros- René, and in Homer they say to Minerva, who takes them by the hair : " What wouldst thou with me, Goddess? " A surprising exception has been conceded to Dante. The man of Dante is Dante. Dante has, so to speak, recreated himself in his poem : he is his own type; his Adam is himself. For the action of his poem he has sought out no one. He has taken Virgil only as a sup'ernumerary. More^- over, he made himself epic at once, without even giving himself the trouble to change his name. What he had to do was in fact simple, — to descend into hell, and remount to heaven. What use was it to trouble himself for so little? He knocks gravely at the door of the Infinité and says: "Open! I am Dante." 228 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. CHAPTER III. The man of iEschylus, Prometheus, and the man of Shakespeare, Hamlet, are as we hâve just said, — two marvellous Adams. Prometheus îs action; Hamlet is hésitation. In Prometheus the obstacle is exterior ; in Hamlet it is interior. In Prometheus the four limbs of incarnate Will are nailed down with brazen spikes, and cannot move: besides, it has by its side two watchers, Force and Power. In Hamlet the Will is still more enthralled : it is bound by preliminary méditation, the endless chain of the irresolute. Try to get out of yourself if you can ! What a Gordian knot îs our revery ! Slavery from withîn, îs slavery in- deed. Scale me the barricade of thought ! escape, îf you can, from the prison of love! The only dungeon is that which immures the conscience. Prometheus, in order to be free, has but a bronze collar to break and a god to conquer; Hamlet must break and conquer himself. Prometheus can rise upright. quit with lifting a mountain; in order that Hamlet may stand erect, he must lift his own thought. If Prometheus plucks the vulture from his breast, ail is done ; Hamlet must rend from his flank Hamlet. Prometheus and Hamlet are two livers laid bare: from the one trickles blood, from the other doubt WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 229 We are in the habit of comparing iEschylus and Shakespeare by Orestes and Hamlet, thèse two tragédies being the same drama. Never in fact was there more identity of subject. The learned note an analogy between them ; the impotent, who are also the ignorant, the envious, who are also the imbécile, hâve the petty joy of thinking they detect a plagiarism. There is hère, for the rest, a possible field for comparative érudition and for serions criticism. Hamlet walks behind Orestes, a parricide through filial love. This easy com- parison, rather superficial than substantial, is less striking than the mysterious confrontment of those two captives, Prometheus and Hamlet. Let it not be forgotten that the human mind, half divine as it is, créâtes from time to time super- human works. Furthermore, thèse superhuman Works of man are more numerous than is believed, for they make up the whole of art. Outside of poetry, where wonders abound, there is, în music, Beethoven ; in sculpture, Phidias ; in architecture, Piranesi ; in painting, Rembrandt ; and in paintîng, architecture, and sculpture, Michael Angelo. We pass over many, and not the least Prometheus and Hamlet are among thèse more than human works. A kind of gigantic prepossession : the usual measure exceeded ; greatness everywhere, — the dismay of commonplace minds ; the true demon- strated, when necessary, by the improbable ; destiny, society, law, religion, brought to trial and judgment in the name of the Unknown, the abyss of the mysterious equilibrium ; the event treated 230 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. as a rôle to be played, and, on occasion, hurled as a reproach agaînst Fatality or Providence ; Passion, terrible personage, going and coming in man ; the audacity and sometimes the insolence of reason ; the haughty forms of a style at ease in ail extrêmes, and at the same time a profound wisdom; the gentleness of the giant, the good nature of a softened monster ; an ineflfable dawn which cannot be accounted for and which lights up everything : such are the signs of thèse suprême works. In certain poems there is starlight. This light is in i£schylus and in Shakespeare. CHAPTER IV. NOTHING can be more fiercely wild than Prome- theus stretched on the Caucasus. It is gigantic tragedy. The old punishment which our ancient laws of torture called " extension," and which Car- touche escaped because of a hernia, — this, Prome- theus undergoes; only the rack is a mountain. What is his crime? The Right. To characterize right as crime, and movement as rébellion, is the immémorial skill of tyrants. Prometheus has done on Olympus what Eve did in Eden, — he has taken a little knowledge. Jupiter — identical, in- deed, with Jehovah {lovit lova) — punishes this temerîty of having desired to live. The iEginetic traditions, which localize Jupiter, deprive him of the cosmic impersonality of the Jehovah of Genesis. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 23 1 The Greek Jupiter — bad son of a bad father, în rébellion against Saturn, who bas himself been a rebel against Cœlus, — is an upstart. The Titans are a sort of elder branch which has its legitimists, of whom -^schylus, the avenger of Prometheus, was one. Prometheus is the right conquered. Jupiter has, as is always the case, consummated the usur- pation of power by the punishment of right Olympus claims the aid of Caucasus. Prometheus is fastened there by the brazen coUar. There îs the Titan, fallen, prostrate, nailed down. Mercury, everybody's friend, comes to give hîm such coun- sel as generally foUows the perpétration of coups if état, Mercury îs the cowardice of intelligence ; the embodiment of ail possible vice, but fuU of cleverness : Mercury, the god Vice, serves Jupiter, the god Crime. Thèse flunkeys in evil are marked to this day by the vénération of the thief for the assassin. There is something of that law in the arrivai of the diplomatist behind the conqueror. The masterworks are immense în this, — that they are eternally présent at the deeds of humanity. Prometheus on the Caucasus, îs Poland after 1772 ; France after 1815 ; the Révolution after Brumaire. Mercury speaks; Prometheus listens but little. Offers of amnesty miscarry when it îs the victim alone who should hâve the right to grant pardon. Prometheus, thrown to earth, scorns Mercury standing proudly above him, and Jupiter standing above Mercury, and Destiny standing above Jupi- ter. Prometheus jests at the vulture which gnaws at him; he disdainfully shrugs hîs shoulders as much as his chain allows. What does he care for 232 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Jupiter, and of what good îs Mercury? There îs no hold upon thîs haughty sufferer. The scorch- îng thunderbolt causes a smart, which is a constant appeal to pride. Meanwhîle tears flow around hîm, the earth despaîrs, the cloud-women — the fifty Oceanides — come to worship the Titan, forests cry alpud, wild beasts groan, winds howl, waves sob, the éléments moan, the world suffers in Prometheus, — his brazen collar chokes the universal life. An immense participation in the torture of the demigod seems to be henceforth the tragic delight of ail Nature ; anxiety for the future mingles with it: and what is to be donc now? How are we to move? What will become of us? And in the vast whole of created beîngs, things, men, animais, plants, rocks, ail turned toward the Caucasus, is felt this unspeakable anguish : the liberator is enchained. Hamlet, less gigantic and more human, îs not less great. Hamlet, that awful being complète in incom- pleteness; ail, in order to be nothing! He îs prince and démagogue, sagacîous and extravagant, profound and frivolous, man and neuter. He has little faith in the sceptre, rails at the throne, has a student for his comrade, converses with any one passing by, argues with the first comer, understands the people, despises the mob, hâtes violence, dis- trusts success, questions obscurity, and is on speaking terms with mystery. He communicates to others maladies that he has not himself ; his feigned madness inoculâtes his mistress with real madness. He is familiar with spectres and with WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 233 actors. He jests, with the axe of Orestes in his hand. He talks literature, recites verses, composes a theatrical criticism, plays with bones in a church- yard, dumfounds his mother, avenges his father, and closes the dread drama of life and death with a gigantic point of interrogation. He terrifies, and then disconcerts. Never has anything more over- whelming been dreamed. It is the parricide saying, ** What do I know?" Parricide? Let us pause upon that word. Is Hamlet a parricide? Yes, and no. He confines himself to threatening his mother ; but the threat is so fierce that the mother shudders. " Thy word is a dagger! . . . What wilt thou do? Thou wilt not murder me? Help ! help ! ho ! " — and when she dies, Hamlet, without grieving for her, strikes Claudius with the tragic cry : " Follow my mother ! " Hamlet is that sinister thing, the possible parricide.^ Instead of the North, which he has in his brain, let him hâve, like Orestes, the South in his veins, and he will kill his mother. This drama is stern. In ît truth doubts, sin- cerity lies. Nothing can be vaster, nothing subtler. In it man is the world, and the world is zéro. Hamlet, even in full life, is not sure of his exist- ence. In this tragedy — which is at the same timc a philosophy — everything floats, hésitâtes, shuffles, staggers, becomes discomposed, scatters, and is dispersed. Thought is a cloud, will is a vapor, resolution a twilight; the action blows every 1 The quotation from * Hamlet ' is left in the inexact form that Hugo gave it. — T*. 234 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. moment from a différent direction : the mariner's card governs man. A work which disturbs and makes dîzzy; in which the bottom of everything is laid bare ; where the pendulum of thought oscillâtes only from the murdered king to buried Yorick; and where that which îs most real is kingliness impersonated in a ghost, and mirth represented by a death*s-head. Hamlet is the suprême tragedy of the human dream. CHAPTER V. One of the probable causes of the feigned mad- ness of Hamlet has not been, up to the présent time, indicated by critics. It has been said, "Hamlet acts the madman to hide his thought, like Brutus/* In fact, it is easy for apparent im- becility to hatch a great project; the supposed idiot can take aim deliberately. But the case of Brutus is not that of Hamlet. Hamlet acts the madman for his safety. Brutus screens his pro- ject, Hamlet his person. Given the manners of those tragic courts, from the momçnt that, through the révélation of the ghost, Hamlet is acquainted with the crime of Claudius, he is in danger. The superior historian within the poet is manifested, and one feels the deep insight of Shakespeare into the darkness of the ancient royalty. In the Middle Ages and in the Eastern Empire, and WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 235 even at earlîer perîods, woe unto him who found out a murder or a poisoning committed by a king! Ovid, according to Voltaire's conjecture, was exiled from Rome for having seen somethîng shameful in the house of Augustus. To know that the King was an assassin, was a state crime. When it pleased the prince not to hâve had a wit- ness, it was a matter of life and death to know nothing; it was bad policy to hâve good eyes. A man suspected of suspicion was lost He had but one refuge, — madness ; to pass for ** an inno- cent : " he was despîsed, and that was ail. You remember the advice that, in iEschylus, the Océan gîves to Prometheus : " To seem mad is the secret of the sage." When the Chamberlain Hugolin found the iron spit with which Edric of Mercia^ had împaled Edmund II., ** he hastened to put on madness," says the Saxon chronicle of 1016, and saved himself in that way. Heraclides of Nisibis, having discovered by chance that Rhinometer was a fratricide, had himself declared insane by the doctors, and succeeded in getting himself shut up for life in a cloister. He thus lived peaceably, growing old, and waiting for death with a vacant stare. Hamlet runs the same risk, and has re- course to the same means. He gets himself de- clared insane like Heraclides, and puts on madness like Hugolin. This does not prevent the uneasy Claudius from twice making an effort to get rid * Freeman says : " The chronicles are silcnt as to the manner of Eadmund's death." — Norman Conquest^ î. 470. The reality of the murder is very doubtful. The story of Hugolin is not men- tioned by Freeman. — Tr. 236 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. of hîm, — in the middle of the drama by the axe or the dagger, and toward the end by poison. The same indication is again found in * King Lear : * the Earl of Gloucester's son takes refuge also in apparent lunacy. Herein is a key to open and understand Shakespeare's thought. To the eyes of the philosophy of Art, the feigned madness of Edgar throws light upon the feigned madness of Hamlet. The Hamblet of Belleforest is a magician ; the Hamlet of Shakespeare is a philosopher. We just now spoke of the singular reality which characterizes poetical créations. There is no more strikîng example than this type, Hamlet. Hamlet is not in the least an abstraction. He has been at the university; he has the Danish savage- ness softened by the Italian politeness ; he is short, plump, somewhat lymphatic ; he fences well, but is soon out of breath. He does not care to drink too soon durîng the fencing-bout with Laertes, — probably for fear of sweating. After having thus supplied his personage with real life, the poet can launch him into the full idéal; there is ballast enough. Other Works of the human mind equal ' Hamlet;' none surpasses it. There is in * Hamlet ' ail the majesty of the mournful. A drama issuing from an open sepulchre, — this is colossal. * Hamlet ' is to our mind Shakespeare's capital work. No figure among those that poets hâve created is more poignant and more disquieting. Doubt counselled by a ghost, — such is Hamlet. Ham- let has seen his dead father and has spoken to him. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 237 Is he convînced? No; he shakes hîs head. What shall he do? He does not know. His hands clench, then fall by his side. Within him are con- jectures, Systems, monstrous apparitions, bloody recollections, vénération for the ghost, hâte, tender- ness, anxiety to act and not to act, his father, his mother, conflicting duties, — a profound storm. His mind is occupied with ghastly hésitation. Shakespeare, wonderful plastic poet, makes the grandiose pallor of this soûl almost visible. Like the great spectre of Albrecht Diirer, Hamlet might be named * Melancholia.' Above his head, too, there flits the disembowelled bat; at hîs feet are science, the sphère, the compass, the hour-glass, love ; and behind him, at the horizon, a great and terrible sun, which seems to make the sky but darker. Nevertheless, at least one half of Hamlet îs anger, transport, outrage, hurricane, sarcasm to Ophelia, malédiction on his mother, insuit to him- self He talks with the grave-diggers, almost laughs, then clutches Laertes by the haïr in the very grave of Ophelia, and tramples furiously up- on that coffin. Sword-thrusts at Polonius, sword- thrusts at Laertes, sword-thrusts at Claudius. At tîmes his inaction gapes open, and from the rent, thunderbolts flash out. He is tormented by that possible life, interwoven of reality and dream, concerning which we are ail anxious. Somnambulism is diffused through ail hîs actions. One might almost consider his brain as a formation: there is a layer of sufferîng, a layer of thought, then a layer of dream. It is 238 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. through thîs layer of dream that he feels, compre- hends, learns, perceîves, drinks, eats, frets, mocks, weeps, and reasons. There is between life and him a transparency, — the wall of dreams ; one sees beyond it, but one cannot step over ît. A kind of cloudy obstacle everywhere surrounds Hamlet. Hâve you never, while sleeping, had the nightmare of pursuît or flight, and tried to hasten on, and felt the anchylosis of your knees, the heaviness of your arms, the horrible paralysis of your benumbed hands? This nightmare Hamlet suffers whîle awake. Hamlet is not upon the spot where his life is. He has ever the air of a man who talks to you from the other side of a stream. He calls to you at the same time that he questions you. He is at a distance from the catastrophe in which he moves, from the passer-by he questions, from the thought he bears, from the action he per- forms. He seems not to touch even what he crushes. Thîs is isolation carried to its highest power. It is the loneliness of a mind, even more than the unapproachableness of a prince. Indé- cision is, in fact, a solitude; you hâve not even your will to keep you company. It is as if your own self had departed and had left you there. The burden of Hamlet is less rigid than that of Orestes ; it fits patter to his form : Orestes bears ' fatality, Hamlet destiny. And thus, apart from men, Hamlet stîll has within him an undefined something which repre- sents them ail. Agnosco fratrem. If at certain hours we felt our own puise, we should be con- scious of his fever. His strange reality is our own WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, 239 realîty, after ail. He îs the mournful man that we ail are in certain situations. Unhealthy as he îs, Hamlet expresses a permanent condition of man. He represents the discomfort of the soûl in a life unsuited to it. He represents the shoe that pinches and stops our walking: this shoe îs the body. Shakespeare delivers hîm from ît, and rightly. Hamlet — prince if you like, but king never — is incapable of governing a people, so wholly apart from ail does he exist. On the other hand, he does better than to reign ; he is. Take from him his family, his country, his ghost, the whole adventure at Elsinore, and even in the form of an inactive type he remains strangely terrible. This results from the amount of humanity and the amount of mystery in him. Hamlet îs formidable, — which does not prevent his being ironîcal. He has the two profiles of destiny. Let us retract a word said above. The capital work of Shakespeare is not * Hamlet : ' the capital work of Shakespeare îs ail Shakespeare. This îs, moreover, true of ail minds of this order. They are mass, block, majesty, bible ; and their unity îs what renders them impressive. Hâve you never gazed upon a beclouded head- land runnîng out beyond eye-shot into the deep sea? Each of its hills contributes to îts make-up. No one of its undulatîons is lost upon it. Its bold outline is sharply marked upon the sky, and juts far out amid the waves ; and there îs not a useless rock. Thanks to this cape, you can go amidst the boundless waters, walk among the wînds, see closely the eagles soar and the monsters swîm, 240 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. let your humanîty wander in the eternal uproar, penetrate the impénétrable. The poet renders this service to your mind. A genius is a headland into the infinité. CHAPTER VT. WiTH * Hamlet/ and upon the same level, must be placed three noble dramas, — ' Macbeth,' 'Othello/ 'King Lear.' Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, Lear — thèse four figures tower upon the lofty édifice of Shakespeare. We hâve saîd what Hamlet is. To say " Macbeth is ambition," is to say nothing. Macbeth is hunger. What hunger? The hunger of the monster, always possible in man. Certain soûls hâve teeth. Do not arouse their hunger. To bite at the apple is a fearful thing. The ap- ple is named " Omnia," says Filesac, that doctor of the Sorbonne who confessed Ravaillac. Macbeth has a wife whom the chronicle calls Gruoch. This Eve tempts this Adam. Once Macbeth has taken the fîrst bite, he is lost. The fîrst thing that Adam produces with Eve is Gain; the fîrst thing that Macbeth accomplishes with Gruoch is murder. Covetousness easily becoming violence, violence easily becoming crime, crime easily becoming mad- ness: this progression is in Macbeth. Covetous- ness, Crime, Madness — thèse three night-hags hâve spoken to him in the solitude, and hâve invited him to the throne. The cat Gray-malkin has called him : WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. i/^t Macbeth will be cunnîng; the toad Paddock has called him : Macbeth will be horror. The unsexed being, Gruoch, complètes him. It is done ; Mac- beth is no longer a man. He is no longer anything but an unconscious energy rushing wildly toward evil. Henceforth, no notion of right; appetite is everything. The transitory right of royalty, the eternal right of hospitalîty — Macbeth murders both. He does more than slay them : he ignores them. Before they fell bleeding under his hand, they already lay dead within his soûl. Macbeth begins by this parricide, — the murder of Duncan, his guest; a crime so terrible that, as a consé- quence, in the night when their master is stabbed, the horses of Duncan become wild again. The first step taken, the ground begins to crumble ; it îs the avalanche. Macbeth roUs headlong ; he is precipitated ; he falls and rebounds from one crime to another, evef deeper and deeper. He undergoes the mournful gravitation of matter invading the soûl. He is a thing that destroys. He is a stone of ruin, a flame of war, a beast of prey, a scourge. He marches over ail Scotland, king as he is, his barelegged kernes and his heavily armed gallow- glasses slaughtering, pillaging, massacring. He décimâtes the thanes, he murders Banquo, he mur- ders ail the Macduffs except the one that shall slay him, he murders the nobility, he murders the peo- ple, he murders his country, he murders " sleep." At length the catastrophe arrives, — the forest of Birnam moves against him. Macbeth has înfrînged ail, overstepped ail, destroyed ail, violated ail ; and this desperation ends in arousing even Nature. i6 242 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. Nature loses patience, Nature enters înto action against Macbeth, Nature becomes soûl against the man who has become brute force. This drama has epic proportions. Macbeth rep- resents that frightful hungry créature who prowls throughout history — in the forest called brigand, and on the throne, conqueror. The ancestor of Macbeth îs Nimrod. Thèse men of force, are they forever furious? Let us be just; no. They hâve a goal, which being attained, they stop. Give to Alexander, to Cyrus, to Sesostris, to Caesar — what? — the world ; they are appeased. Geoffrey St. Hilaire said to me one day : " When the lion has eaten, he is at peace wîth Nature." For Cam- byses, Sennacherib, Genghis Khan, and the like, to hâve eaten is to possess the whole earth. They would calm themselves down in the process of digesting the human race. Now what is Othello? He is the night. An immense fatal figure. Night is amorous of day. Darkness loves the dawn. The African adores the white woman. Othello has for his light and for his frenzy, Desdemona. And then, how easy to him is jealousy ! He is great, he is dignified, he is ma- jestic, he soars above^all heads ; he has as an escort bravery, battle, the braying of trumpets, the banners of war, renown, glory; he is radiant with twenty victories, he is studded with stars, this Othello : but he is black. And thus how soon, when jealous, the hero becomes the monster, the black becomes the negro ! How speedily has night beckoned to death ! By the side of Othello, who is night, there is WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, 243 lago, who îs evil — evil, the other form of darkness. Nîght îs but the night of the world ; evil is the nîght of the soûl. How deeply black are perfidy and falsehood ! It is ail one whether what courses through the veins be ink or treason. Whoever has jostled against imposture and perjury, knows ît : one must blindly grope one's way with knavery. Pour hypocrisy upon the break of day, and you put out the sun ; and this, thanks to false religions, îs what happens to God. lago near Othello îs the précipice near the land- slîp. " This way ! " he says in a low voice. The snare advises blindness. The lover of darkness guides the black. Deceit takes upon itself to give what lîght may be required by night. Falsehood serves as a blind man*s dog to jealousy. Othello the negro and lago the traitor pitted against white- ness and candor: what more formidable? Thèse ferocitîes of darkness act in unison. Thèse two incarnations of the éclipse conspire, the one roar- îng, the other sneering, for the tragic suffocation of light. Sound this profound thing. Othello is the night, and beîng night, and wishing to kill, what does he take to slay with? Poison? the club? the axe? the knife? No; the pillow. To kill is to lui! to sleep. Shakespeare himself perhaps did not take this înto account. The creator sometimes, almost unknown to himself, yields to his type, so truly îs that type a power. And ît is thus that Desdemona, spouse of the man Nîght, dies, stifled by the pillow upon whîch the first kiss was given, and which reçoives the last sigh. 244 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. Lear îs the occasion for Cordelia. Maternîty of the daughter toward the father. Profound subject ! A maternity vénérable among ail other materni- ties, so admirably translated by the legend of that Roman girl who in the depth of a prison nurses her old father. The young breast near the white beard: there is no holier sight! Such a filial breast is Cordelia ! Once this figure dreamed of and found, Shake- speare created his drama. Where should he put this consoling vision? In an obscure âge. Shake- speare has taken the year of the world 3105, the time when Joash was king of Judah, Aganippus king of France, and Leir king of England. The whole earth was at that time mysterious. Picture to yourself that epoch. The temple of Jérusalem is still quite new ; the gardens of Semiramis, con- structed nine hundred years before, are beginning to crumble ; the first gold coin appears in -^gina ; the first balance is made by Phydon, tyrant of Argos ; the éclipse of the sun is calculated by the Chinese; three hundred and twelve years hâve passed since Orestes, accused by the Eumenides before the Areopagus, was acquitted; H^siod is just dead; Homer, if he still lives, is a hundred years old ; Lycurgus, thoughtful traveller, re-enters Sparta ; and one may perceive in the depth of the sombre cloud of the Orient the chariot of fire which carries Elijah away : it is at that period that Leir — Lear — lives, and reigns over the dark is- lands. Jonas, Holofernes, Draco, Solon, Thespis, Nebuchadnezzar, Anaximenes who is to invent the sîgns of the zodiac, Cyrus, Zorobabel, Tarquin, WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 245 Pythagoras, iEschylus, are not yet born ; Coriola- nus, Xerxes, Cincinnatus, Pericles, Socrates, Bren- nus, Aristotle, Timoleon, Demosthenes, Alexander, Epicurus, Hannibal, are ghosts awaiting their hour to enter among men ; Judas Maccabaeus, Viriatus, Popilius, Jugurtha, Mithridates, Marius and Sylla, Caesar and Pompey, Cleopatra and Antony, are far away in the future ; and at the moment when Lear is king of Britain and of Iceland, there must pass away eight hundred and ninety-five years before Virgil says, " Penitus toto divisos orbe Britannos," and nine hundred and fifty years before Seneca says " Ultima Thule." The Picts and the Celts (the Scotch and the English) are tattooed. A redskin of the présent day gives a vague idea of an Eng- glishman then.^ It is this twilight that Shake- speare has chosen, — a long, dreamy night in which the inventor is free to put anything he likes : this King Lear, and then a king of France, a duke of Burgundy, a duke of Cornwall, a duke of Albany, an earl of Kent, and an earl of Gloucester. What matters your history to him who has humanity? Besides, he has with him the legend, which is also a kind of science, and as true as history, perhaps, although from another point of view. Shake- speare agrées with Walter Mapes, archdeacon of Oxford, — that is something ; he admits, from Brutus to Cadwaila, the ninety-nine Celtic kings who hâve preceded the Scandinavian Hengist and the Saxon Horsa : and since he believes in Mul- mutius, Cinigisil, Ceolulf, Cassibelan, Cymbeline, 1 Victor Hugo is responsible for the words "English" and " Englishman," instead of "British" and " Briton." — Tr. 246 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Cynulphus, Arvîragus, Guiderius, Escuîn, Cudred, Vortigern, Arthur, Uther Pendragon, he has every right to belîeve in King Lear and to create Corde- lia. This site adopted, the place for the scène marked out, the foundation laid deep, he takes ail in hand and builds his work, — unheard-of édifice. He takes tyranny, of which at a later period he will make weakness, — Lear ; he takes treason, — Edmund ; he takes dévotion, — Kent ; he takes Ingratitude, which begins with a caress, and he gives to this monster two heads, — Goneril, whom the legend calls Gornerille, and Regan, whom the legend calls Ragaii ; ^ hç takes paternity ; he takes royalty ; he takes feudality ; he takes ambition ; he takes madness, which he divides, and he places face to face three madmen — the King's buffoon, madman by trade ; Edgar of Gloucester, mad for prudence' sake ; the King, mad through misery. It is at the summit of this tragic pile that he sets the bending form of Cordelia. There are some formidable cathedral towers, — as, for instance, the Giralda of Seville, — which seem made ail complète, with their spirals, their staîr- cases, their sculptures, their cellars, their caecums, their aërial cells, their sounding chambers, their bells, their wailing, and their mass and their spire, and ail their vastness, in order to support at their summit an angel spreading its golden wings. Such is the drama, ' King Lear/ The father is the pretext for the daughter. 1 In Holînshed*s Chronicle, Shakespeare's source, the names are, Gonorilla, Regan, and Cordeilla ; in Layamon's * Brut,* Gor- noille, Regan, and Cordoille or Gordoyile. — Tr. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 247 That admirable human créature, Lear, serves as a support to this ineffable divine création, Cor- delia. Ail that chaos of crimes, vices, manias, and miseries finds its justification in this shining vision of virtue. Shakespeare, bearing Cordelia in his brain, in creating this tragedy was like a god who, having an Aurora to establish, should make a world to put her in. And what a figure îs that father! What a caryatid ! It îs man stooping. He does nothîng but shift his burdens for others that are heavîer. The more the old man becomes enfeebled, the more his load augments. He lives under an over- burden. He bears at first power, then ingratitude, then isolation, then despair, then hunger and thirst, then madness, then ail Nature. Clouds overcast him, forests heap their shadow upon him, the hur- ricane swoops down upon the nape of his neck, the tempest makes his mantle heavy as lead, the rain weighs upon his shoulders, he walks bent and haggard as if he had the two knees of Night upon his back. Dismayed and yet colossal, he flings to the winds and to the hail this epic cry : " Why do ye hâte me, tempests? Why do ye persécute me ? Ye are not my daughters'' ^ And then ail is over; the light is extinguished ; Reason loses courage, and leaves him ; Lear is in his dotage. This old man, being childish, requires a mother. His daughter appears, his only daughter, Cordelia. 1 ** Nor rain, wind, thunder, fire, are my daughters : I tax not you, you éléments, with unkindness ; I never gave you kingdom, call'd you children, You owe me no subscription." Act iii.» Scène ii. 248 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, For the two others, Regan and Goneril, are ik> longer hîs daughters, — save so far as to entitle them to the name of parricides. Cordelia approaches, — " Sir, do you know me?'* " You are a spirit, I know," replies the old man, with the sublime clairvoyance of frenzy. From this moment the filial nursing begins. Cordelia. applies herself to nursing this old despairing soul„ dying of inanition in hatred. Cordelia nourishes; Lear with love, and his courage revives ; she nourishes him with respect, and the smile returns ; she nourishes him with hope, and confidence is restored ; she nourishes him with wisdom, and reason awakens. Lear, convalescent, rises again, and step by step returns again to life ; the child becomes again an old man, the old man becomes a man again. And behold him happy, this wretched one ! It is upon this expansion of happiness that the catastrophe is hurled down. Alas ! there are traitors, there are perjurers, there are murderers. Cordelia dies. Nothing more heart-rending than this. The old man is stunned ; he no longer understands anything; and, embrac- ing her corpse, he expires. He dies upon hîs daughter's breast. He is saved from the suprême despair of remaining behind her among the living, a poor shadow, to feel the place in his heart empty, and to seek for his soûl, carried away by that sweet being who is departed. O God ! those whom Thou lovest Thou takest away. To live after the flight of the angel ; to be the father orphaned of his child ; to be the eye that no longer bas light; to be the deadened heart that WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 249 knows no more joy ; from time to time to stretch the hands into obscurity and try to reclasp a being who was there (where, then, can she be ?) ; to feel himself forgotten in that departure ; to hâve lost ail reason for being hère below ; to be henceforth a man who goes to and fro before a sepulchre, not received, not admitted, — this is indeed a gloomy destiny. Thou hast done well, poet, to kill this old man.^ 1 Perhaps the reader will pardon, in view of the remarkable parallelism, a référence to Charles Lamb's * Essay on the Tragé- dies of Shakespeare,' which Victor Hugo probably never saw. "A happy endingl as if the living martyrdom that Lear had gone through, — the flaying of his feelings alive, — did not make a fair dismissal from the stage of life the only decorous thing for him." — Tr. BOOK III. ZOILUS AS ETERNAL AS HOMER. CHAPTER I. "That vulgar flatt'rer of the ignoble herd.*'i THIS line is by La Harpe, who aims ît at Shakespeare. Elsewhere La Harpe says : "Shakespeare panders to the mob." Voltaire, as a matter of course, reproaches Shake- speare wîth antithesis : that îs well. And La Beau- melle reproaches Voltaire with antithesis: that is better. Voltaire, when it îs a personal matter with him, pro doma sua, gets angry. " But," he writes, " this Langleviel, alias La Beaumelle, is an ass. I defy you to find in any poet, in any book, a fine thing which is not an image or an antithesis." Voltaire's criticism is double-edged. He wounds and is wounded. This is how he characterizes the Ecclesiastes and the Song of Songs : "Works without order, fuU of low images and coarse ex- pressions." 1 " Ce courtisan grossier du profane vulgaire." WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, 2$! A lîttle whîle after he exclaîms, furîous, — «' The barb'rous Crébillon 's preferred to me I " * An îdler of the Œîl-de-Bœuf, wearing the red heel and the blue ribbon, a stripling and a marquîs, — M. de Créqui, — cornes to Ferney, and writes wîth an air of superiority : " I hâve aeen Voltaire, that old dotard." Thajt the unjust should receive a counterstroke from injustice, is nothing more than right; and Voltaire gets what he deserves. But to throw stones at men of genius is a gênerai law, and ail hâve to bear it To be insulted is, it seems, a coronation. For Salmasius, iEschylus is nothing but farrago.^ Quintilian understands nothing of * The Oresteia.* Sophocles mildly scorned iEschylus. " When he does well, he does not know it," said Sophocles. Racine rejected everything, except two or three scènes of ' The Choephori,* which, by a note in the margin of his copy of iEschylus, he condescended to spare. Fontenelle says in his 'Remarks' : "One does not know what to make of the * Prometheus * of iEschylus. iEschylus is a kind of madman." The eighteenth century, without exception, ridi- cules Diderot for admiring 'The Eumenides.* "The whole of Dante is a hotch-potch," says Chaudon. "Michael Angelo wearies me," says 1 " On m'ose préférer Crébillon le barbare ! " * The passage in Salmasius is curions, and worth transcribing : "Unus ejus Agamemnon obscuritate superat quantum est librorum sacrorum cum suis hebraismis et syrianismis et totâ hellenisticâ supellectile vel farragine.*' — De Re Hellenisticâ, p. 38, ep.dedic. 252 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. Joseph de Maistre. " Not one of the eîght comé- dies of Cervantes îs tolerable," says La Harpe. " It is a pity that Molière does not know how to Write," says Fénelon. " Molière is a base mounte- bank," says Bossuet. "A schoolboy would hâve avoided the mistakes of Milton," says the Abbé Trublet, — an authority as good as any other. "Corneille exaggerates, Shakespeare raves," says Voltaire again, — Voltaire, who must ever be re- sisted, and ever defended. " Shakespeare," says Ben Jonson, " talked heavily and without any wit" How prove the contrary? What is written abides ; talk passes away. Still, so much stands denied to Shakespeare. That man of genius had no wit : how that flatters the numberless men of wit who hâve no genius ! Some time before Scudéry called Corneille "corneille déplumée" (unfeathered carrion-crow), Greene had called Shakespeare "a crow beautified with our feathers." In 1752 Diderot was sent to the fortress of Vincennes for having published the first volume of the * Encyclopsedia,' and the great success of the year was a print sold on the quays which represented a Gray Friar flogging Diderot. Death is always an extenuating circumstance for those guilty of genius ; but although Weber is dead, he is ridiculed in Germany, and for thirty-three years a masterpiece has been disposed of by a pun. *Euryanthe' is called the 'Ennuyante* [tedious woman]. D'Alembert hits at one blow Calderon and Shakespeare. He writes to Voltaire [letter cv.] : " I hâve announced to the Academy your ' Herac- WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 253 lîus ' of Calderon. The Academy will read ît wîth as much pleasure as the harlequinade of Gilles Shakespeare." That everything should be perpetually re-exam- îned, that everything should be contested, even the incontestable, — what does it matter? The éclipse îs a good test of truth as well as of liberty. Genius, being truth and liberty, has a claim to persécution. What does genius care for what is transient? It has been, and will be again. It is not toward the sun that the éclipse casts a shadow. Anything admits of being written. Paper îs very patient. Last year a grave review printed this : " Homer îs about to go out of fashîon." The judgment passed on the philosopher, on the artist, on the poet, îs completed by the portrait of the man. Byron killed his tailor ; Molière married his own daughter ; Shakespeare " loved " Lord Southampton ! " At last, with their appetites whetted for vices, The pit roared for the author, that compend of ail." 1 This compendium of ail the vices is Beaumarchais. As for Byron, we mention this name a second time ; he îs worth the trouble. Read * Glenarvon,' and listen, on the subject of Byron*s abominations, to Lady Bl , whom he had loved, and who, of course, resented it. Phidias was a procurer ; Socrates was an apos- tate and a thîef, " a détacher of mantles ; " Spinoza 1 ** Et pour voir à la fin tous les vices ensemble, Le parterre en tumulte a demandé l'auteur." 254 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. was a renegade and a legacy-hunter ; Dante was a peculator ; Michael Angelo was cudgelled by Julius IL, and quietly put up with it for the sake of five hundred crowns ; D* Aubigné was a courtier sleep- ing în the king's closet, ill-tempered when he was not paid, and to whom Henry IV. was too kînd ; Diderot was a libertine ; Voltaire a miser ; Milton was vénal, — he received a thousand pounds ster- ling for hîs Latin apology for régicide : * Defensio pro se,'^ etc. Who says thèse things? who re- lates thèse stories? That good person, your old fawning friend, O tyrants; your old comrade, O traitors; your old auxiliary, O bigots; your old comforter, O imbéciles ! — Calumny. CHAPTER IL Let us add one particular, — diatribe îs, upon occasion, a means of government. Thus in the print of ' Diderot flogged,' the hand of the police appeared, and the engraver of the Gray Friar must hâve been of close kin to the turnkey of Vincennes. Governments, more pas- sionate than is necessary, fail to keep aloof from the animosities of the crowd below. The political persécution of former days — it is of former days that we are speaking — willingly availed itself of a dash of literary persécution. Certainly, hatred 1 The work referred to is probably Milton*s * Defensio Populi Anglicani,' written by way of reply to Salmasius. — Tr. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 255 hâtes without being paîd for it. Envy, to do îts work does not need a mînister of state to encourage and pension it, and there is such a thing as unofficial calumny. But a money-bag does no harm. When Roy, the court-poet, rhymed against Voltaire, "Tell me, daring stoic,*' etc., the position of treasurer of the excise office of Clermont, and the cross of St. Michael, were not likely to damp his enthusiasm for the court, and his spirit against Vol- taire. A gratuity is pleasant to receive after a ser- vice rendered. The masters upstairs smile; you receive the agreeable order to insuit some one you detest ; you obey amply ; you are free to bite ad libitum; you take your fiU: it is ail profit; you hâte, and you give satisfaction. Formerly, autho- rity had its scribes. It was a pack of hounds as good as any other. Against the free rebellious spirit, the despot would let loose the scribbler. To torture was not sufficient ; teasing was resorted to likewise. Trissotin would hold a confabulation with Vidocq, and from their tête-à-tête a complex inspiration would resuit. Pedantry, thus supported by the police, felt itself an intégra] part of authority, and strengthened its aesthetics with légal means. It grew haughty. No arrogance is equal to that of the base pédant raised to the dignity of bum- bailiff. See, after the struggle between the Armin- ians and the Gomarists, with what a superb air Sparanus Buyter, his pockets full of Maurice of Nassau's florins, denounces Joost Vondel, and proves, Aristotle in hand, that the Palamedes of Vondel's tragedy is no other than Barneveldt ! — useful rhetoric, by whîch Buyter obtains against 256 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. Vondcl a fine of three hundred crowns, and for himself a fat prebend at Dordrecht. The author of the book, ' Literary Quarrels/ the Abbé Irail, canon of Monistrol, asks of La Beau- melle, " Why do you insuit M. de Voltaire so much ? " " It is because it sells well," replies La Beaumelle. And Voltaire, informed of the ques- tion and of the reply, concludes: "Precîsely so: the simpleton buys the writing, and the minister buys the writer. It sells well." Françoise d'Issembourg de Happoncourt, wife of François Hugo, Chamberlain of Lorraine, and celebrated under the name of Madame de Graf- figny, writes to M. Devaux, reader to King Stan- îslaus : ** My dear Pampan, Atys being sent away (Read: Voltaire being banished), the police cause to be published against him a swarm of small writ- îngs and pamphlets, which are sold at a sou in the cafés and théâtres. That would displease the Mar- quise,^ if it did not please the King." Desfontaines, that other insulter of Voltaire, — who had rescued him from the mad-house of Bicêtre, — said to the Abbé Prévost, who advised him to make his peace with the philosopher : *' If Algiers did not make-war, Algiers would die of hunger." This Desfontaines, also an abbé, died of dropsy ; and his well-known tastes gained for him this epi- taph : " Periit aqua qui meruit igné/* Among the publications suppressed in the last century by decree of parliament, is found a docu- ment printed by Quinet and Besogne, and destroyed ^ Madame de Pompadour. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, 25/ doubtless because of the révélations which ît con- tained, and of which the title gave promise : ' The Aretiniad ; ^ or, Price-list of Libellers and Abusive Men of Letters/ Madame de Staël, exiled to a distance of forty- five leagues from Paris, stops exactly at the forty- five leagues, — at Beaumont-sur-Loire, — and thence writes to her friends. Hère is a fragment of a let- ter addressed to Madame Gay, mother of the illus- trions Madame de Girardin : " Ah, dear madame, what a persécution are thèse exiles ! " (We sup- press some Unes.) " You write a book ; it is for- bidden to speak of it. Your name in the jotirnals displeases. Permission is, however, fully given to speak ill of it" CHAPTER III. SOMETIMES the diatribe is sprinkled with quîck- lime. AU thèse black pen-nibs end by diggîng dismal pits. Among the writers abhorred for having been useful. Voltaire and Rousseau stand in the first rank. Living, they were lacerated ; dead, they were man- gled. To hâve a hack at thèse renowned ones was a splendid deed, and set down as such in the bills of service of literary catchpoUs. To insuit Voltaire even once, was enough to give one the rank of ^ From Pietro Aretino, the literary jackal of ^ the sixteenth cen- tury. — Tr. 17 258 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. pedant-laureate. Men of power egged on the men of libel. A swarm of mosquitoes settled upon thèse two illustrions men, and the însects are stili hummîng. Voltaire îs the more hated, being the greater. Everything was good for an attack on him, every- thing was a pretext: the princesses of France, Newton, Madame du Châtelet, the Princess of Prus- sîa, Maupertuis, Frederick, the Encyclopaedia, the Academy, even Labarre, Sirven, and Calas. Never a truce. His popularity suggested to Joseph de Maistre this Une: "Paris crowned him; Sodom would hâve banished him/* Arouet was translated înto A rouer} At the house of the Abbess of Nivelles, Princess of the Holy Empire, half recluse and half wordling, — having recourse, it is said, in order to make her cheeks rosy, to the method of the Abbess of Montbazon, — charades were played ; among others, this one : " The first syllable is his fortune; the second should be his duty." The Word was Vol-taire.^ A celebrated member of the Academy of Sciences, Napoléon Bonaparte, seeing în 1803, in the library of the Institute, this inscrip- tion in the centre of a crown of laurels, " To the Great Voltaire," scratched with his nail the last three letters, leaving only " To the Great Volta ! " Around Voltaire especially there is a sanitary cordon of priests, the Abbé Desfontaines at the head, the Abbé Nicolardot at the tail. Fréron, although a layman, is a critic after the priestly fashion, and belongs to this band. 1 Deserving of being broken on the wheel. — Tr. « va, " thef V taire, " to be aHent. " — Tr. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 259 It was at the Bastîle that Voltaire made his début, His cell was next to the dungeon in which Bernard Palissy had died. Young, he tasted the prison ; old, he tasted exile. He was kept twenty-seven years away from Paris. Jean-Jacques, being wild and somewhat solitary, was, in conséquence of thèse traits, hunted about. Paris îssued a writ against his person ; Geneva ex- pelled him ; Neufchâtel rejected him : Motiers- Travers condemned him; Bienne stoned him; Berne gave him the choice between prison and expulsion; London, hospitable London, scoffed at him. Both died at about the same time.^ Death caused no interruption to the outrages. A man is dead; însult does not slacken pursuit for such a trifle. Hatred can feast on a corpse. Libels con- tînued, piously rabid against such glory. The Révolution came, and placed them in the Panthéon. At the beginning of thîs century, children were often brought to see thèse two graves. They were told, " It is hère ! " That made a strong impression on their minds. They carried forever in their thought that vision of two sepulchres side by side : the élliptical arch of the vault, the antique form of the two monuments provisionally covered wîth wood painted like marble ; thèse two names, Rousseau, Voltaire, in the twilight ; and the hand bearing a torch which was thrust out of the tomb of Jean-Jacques. Louis XVIII. returned. The restoration bf the ^ Voltaire died May 30, 17785 Rousseau, four days later. — Tr. 260 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Stuarts had torn Cromwell from his grave; the restoration of the Bourbons could net do less for Voltaire. One night, in May, 1814, about two o'clock in the morning, a cab stopped near the city-gate of La Gare, opposite Bercy, at a door in a board fence. This fence surrounded a large vacant pièce of ground, reserved for the projected warehouses, and belonging to the city of Paris. The cab had corne from the Panthéon, and the coachman had been ordered to take the most deserted streets. The fence-gate was opened. Some men alighted from the cab and entered the inclosure. Two carried a sack between them. They were conducted, so tradition asserts, by the Marquis de Puymaurin, afterward deputy to the Invisible Chamber^ and Director of the Mint, accompanied by his brother, the Comte de Puymaurin. Other men, some in cassocks, were awaiting them. They proceeded toward a hole dug in the middle of the field. This hole — according to one of the witnesses, who has since been a waiter at the Marronniers inn at La Râpée — was round, and looked like a dry well. At the bottom of the hole was quicklime. Thèse men said nothing, and had no lanterns. The wan daybreak gave a ghastly light. The sack was opened. It was full of bones. Thèse were the întermingled bones of Jean-Jacques and of Voltaire, which had just been withdrawn from the Panthéon. The mouth of the sack was brought close to the hole, and the bones were thrown into that black 1 " Chambre introuvable," referring to the French Chamber of Deputies of 1815. — Tr. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 26 1 pit. The two skulls struck against each other: a spark, not likely to be seen by such men as those présent, was doubtless exchanged between the head that had made *The Philosophical Dictionary' and the head that had made 'The Social Contract/ and reconciled them. When that was done, when the sack had been shaken, when Voltaire and Rousseau had been emptied into that hole, a digger seized a spade, threw into the opening the heap of earth at the side, and filled up the grave. The others stamped with their feet on the ground, so as to remove from it the appearance of having been freshly disturbed; one of the assistants took for his trouble the sack, — as the hangman takes the clothing of his victim ; they left the inclosure, shut the gâte, got into the cab without saying a word, and hastily, before the sun had risen, thèse men got away. CHAPTER IV. Salmasius, that worse Scaliger, does not com- prehend iEschylus, and rejects him. Who îs to blâme? Salmasius much; iEschylus little. The attentive man who reads great works feels at times, in the midst of his reading, certain sudden chills, followed by a kind of excess of heat, — " I no longer understand ! ... I understand ! " — shivering and burning, something which causes him to be a little upset at the same timc that he is very much struck. Only minds of the first 262 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. order, only men of suprême genius, subject to absences in the înfinite, give to the reader this singular sensation, — stupor for the most, ecstasy for a few. Thèse few are the children of light. As we hâve already observed, thèse sélect few, gather- ing from century to century, and continu ally gain- îng recruits, at last become numerous, and make up the suprême company, the définitive public of genius, and like it, sovereign. It is with this public that, first or last, one must deal. Meanwhile there îs another public; there are other appraisers, other judges, to whom we hâve just now given a word. Thèse are not content. The men of genius, the great minds, — this iEschylus, this Isaiah, this Juvenal, this Dante, this Shakespeare, — are beings imperious, tumul- tuous, violent, passionate, hard riders of winged steeds, " overleaping ail boundaries," having their own goal, which itself " is beyond the mark," " exaggerated," taking scandalous strides, flying abruptly from one idea to another, and from the North Pôle to the South Pôle, crossing the heavens in three steps, making little allowance for the scant of breath, shaken by ail the winds of space, and at the same time fuU of some unaccountable equestrian confidence amidst their bounds across the abyss, intractable to the " Aristarchs," refrac- tory to officiai rhetoric, not amiable to asthmatic literati, unsubdued to académie hygiène, preferring the foam of Pegasus to ass's-milk. The worthy pédants are kind cnough to fear for them. The asccnt occasions a calculation of the WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, 263 fall. Compassionate cripples lament for Shake- speare. He is mad; he mounts too hîgh! The mob of collège scouts (they are a mob) look on în wonder, and get angry. ^Eschylus and Dante make thèse connoisseurs blink every moment. This iEschylus îs lost ! This Dante is near falling ! A god spreads hîs wings for flight: the Philis- tînes cry out to him, " Mind yourself ! " CHAPTER V.. Besides, thèse men of genîus are disconcertîng. There îs no reckonîng with them. Theîr lyric fury obeys them ; they înterrupt it when they lîke. They seem wild. Suddenly they stop. Theîr frenzy becomes melancholy. They are seen among the précipices, alighting on a peak and folding theîr wings ; and then they gîve way to méditation. Theîr méditation is not less surprising than theîr transport. Just now they were soarîng, now they are sinking shafts. But theîr audacîty îs ever the same. They are pensive giants. Their Titanic revery needs the absolute and the unfathomable for its expansion. They medîtate as the suns shine, con- ditioned by the médium of the abyss around them. Theîr roving to and fro în the idéal dizzies the observer. Nothing îs too hîgh for them, and noth- ing too low. They pass from the pigmy to the Cyclops, from Polyphemus to the Myrmidons, from Queen Mab to Caliban, from a love-affaîr to a déluge, from Saturn's rings to a çhild's doll. 204 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. Sinite parvulos venire, One of their eyes is a téle- scope, the other a microscope. They investigate familiarly those two frightful inverse depths, — the infinitely great, and the infinitely little. And one should not be angry with them ! and one should not reproach them for ail this ! In- deed, what would resuit if such excesses were to be tolerated ? What ! No scruple in the choice of subjects, horrible or sad ; and the thought, even if it be distressing and formidable, always relent- lessly foUowed up to its extrême conséquence! Thèse poets see only their own aim ; and in every- thing they hâve an immoderate way of doing things. What is Job? A maggot upon a sore. What is the Divina Commedia? A séries of torments. What is the Iliad? A collection of plagues and wounds. Not an artery eut which is not com- placently described. Go about for opinions of Homer ; ask Scaliger, Terrasson, Lamotte, what they think of him. The fourth of a canto to the shield of Achilles — what want of proportion ! He who does not know when to stop, never knew how to Write. Thèse poets agitate, disturb, trouble, upset, overwhelm, make everything shiver, break things occasionally hère and there ; they may do mischief, — the thing is serions ! Thus speak the Athenaea, the Sorbonnes, the sworn professors, the societies called ** learned," Salmasius, successor of Scaliger at the University of Leyden, and the Philistines after them, — ail who represent in liter- ature and art the great party of order. What can bc more natural? The cough quarrels with the hurricane. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, 20$ Those who are poor în wît are joîned by those who hâve too much wît. The sceptics joîn hands with the simpletons. Men of genius, with few ex- ceptions, are proud and stern ; that îs în the very marrow of their bones. They hâve în theîr Com- pany Juvenal, Agrippa d*Aubîgné, and Milton; they are prone to harshness; they despîse the panent et circenses ; they seldom grow sociable, and they growl. People do well to rally them în a pleasant way. Aha, Poet ! Aha, Mîlton ! Aha, Juvenal ! So you keep up résistance ! you perpetuate dîsinter- estedness ! you bring together those two firebrands, faith and will, in order to draw flame from them ! So there îs something of the Vestal in you, old grumbler ! So you hâve an altar, — your country ! you hâve a tripod, — the idéal ! you believe in the rights of man, în émancipation, în the future, în progress, in the beautiful, in the just, în what îs great ! Take care ; you are behîndhand ! Ali this virtue îs infatuation. You emigrate with honor, — but you emigrate. This heroism îs no longer în good form. It no longer suits the spirit of the time. There comes a moment when the sacred fire îs no longer fashîonable. Poet, you believe în right and truth ; you are behind your âge. Your very îmmortality makes you a thing of the past. So much the worse, without doubt, for those grumbling geniuses accustomed to greatness, and scornful of what îs not great. They are slow of movement when honor îs at stake; theî^ back îs struck with anchylosis for anything like bowing and cringing; when succcss passes along, descrvcd ^66 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, or not, but saluted, they havc an îron bar stiffcning their vertébral column. That îs their afFair. So much the worse for those antique Romans. They are ready to be relegated to antiquarian muséums. To bristle up at every turn may hâve been ail very well in former days ; thèse unkempt mânes are no longer worn; lions went out of fashion with the perukes. The French Révolution is nearly seventy- five years old; at that âge dotage comes. The people of the présent time mean to belong to their day, and even to their minute. Certainly, we find no fault with this. Whatever is, must be; it is quite right that what exists should exist ; the forms of public prosperity are diverse ; one gén- ération is not bound to imitate another. Cato took example from Phocion ; Trimalchio, who is suf- ficiently unlike either, embodies the idea of inde- pendence. You bad-tempered old fellows, you wish us to emancipate ourselves? Let it be so. We disencumber ourselves of the imitation of Timoleon, Thrasea, Artevelde, Thomas More, Hampden. This is our way of emancipating our- selves. You wish for a revolt, — there it is. You wish for an insurrection, — we rise up against our rights. We enfranchise ourselves from the solici- tudes of freedom. Citizenship is a heavy burden. Rights entangled with obligations are shackles to one who desires mère enjoyment. It is fatiguing to be guided by conscience and truth in ail the steps that we take. We mean to walk without leading-strings and without princîples. Duty îs à chain ; we break our shackles. What do you mean by speaking to us of Franklin ? Franklin is a rather WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, 267 too servile copy of Aristides. We carry our horror of servility so far as to prefer Grimod de la Reynîère. To eat and drink well is an aim in life. Each epoch has its peculiar manner of being free. Feasting îs freedom. This way of reasoning is trîumphant ; to adhère to it is wise. There hâve been, it îs true, epochs when people thought otherwise. In those times the things which were trodden on would sometimes resent it, and would rebel; but that was the ancient fashion, ridiculous now; and tire- some people and croakers must just be allowed to go on affirming that there was a better notion of right, justice, and honor in the paving-stones of yore than in the men of the présent. The rhetoricians, officiai and officious, — we hâve pointed out already their wonderful sagacity, — take strong précautions against men of genius. Men of genius are but slightly académie; what is more, they do not abound in commonplaces. They are lyrists, colorists, enthusiasts, enchanters, possessed, exalted, " rabid," — we hâve read the word, — beings who, when everybody is small, hâve a mania for creating great characters ; in fact, they hâve every vice. A doctor has recently discovered that genius is a variety of madness. They are Michael Angelo chiselling giants, Rembrandt painting with a pal- ette ail bedaubed with the sun's rays ; they are Dante, Rabelais, Shakespeare, — excessive. They bring with them a style of art wild, howling, flam- ing, dishevelled like the lion and the comet. Oh, shocking! People are right in forming combina- tîons against them. It is a fortunate circumstance that the " teetotallers " of éloquence and poetry 268 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. exîst. " I admire pallor," said a literary Philistine one day, — for there is a literary Philistine. Rhet- oricîans, solicitous on account of the contagions and fevers which are spread by genius, recommend, with a lofty wisdom which we hâve conrmended, tempérance, modération, " common sensé," the art of keeping within bounds ; writers expurgated, trimmed, pruned, regulated; the worship of the qualities that the malignant call négative, — conti- nence, abstinence, Joseph, Scipio, the water-drinkers. Ail this is excellent ; only young students must be warned that by following thèse sage precepts too closely they run the risk of glorifying the chastity of the eunuch. Perhaps I admire Bayard ; I ad- mire Origen less. CHAPTER VI. SUMMARY statement: Great minds are împor- tunate ; it is judicious to restrain them a little. After ail, let us admit it at .last, and complète our statement : there is some truth in the re- proaches that are hurled at them. This anger is natural. The powerful, the grand, the luminous, are, from a certain point of view, things calculated to ofFend. To be surpassed is never agreeable; to feel one's own inferiority is to feel a pang. The beautiful exists so truly by itself that it certainly has no need of pride; nevertheless, given human mediocrity, the beautiful humiliâtes at the same time that it enchants : it scems natural that bcauty WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, 269 should be a vase for prîde, — a brimmîng vase; so that the pleasure beauty gives is tainted with resentment, and the word "superb " cornes finally to hâve two sensés, one of which breeds distrust of the other. This is the fault of the beautiful, as we hâve already said. It wearies : a sketch t)y Pira- nesi disconcerts you ; the hand-grasp of Hercules bruises you. Greatness is sometimes in the wrong. It is ingenuous, but obstructive. The tempest thinks to sprinkle you: it drowns you; the star thinks to give light : it dazzles, sometimes blinds. The Nile fertilizes, but overflows. Excess does not comport with comfort: the deeps of space form but an inhospitable dwelling-place ; the infinité is scarcely tenantable. A cottage is badly situated on the cataract of Niagara, or in the circus of Gavarnie; it is awkward to keep house with thèse fierce wonders: to fréquent them regularly without being overwhelmed, one must be a crétin or a genius. The dawn itself at times seems to us immoderate : he who looks straight at ît, sufFers; th^ï eye at certain moments thinks very ill of the sun. Let us not, then, be surprised at the complaints made, at the incessant protests, at the fits of passion and prudence, at the poultices applied by a certain school of criticism, at the chronic ophthalmy of académies and teaching bodies, at the précautions suggested to the reader, at ail the curtains drawn and at ail the shades set up against genius. Genius is intolérant unawares, because it is genius. What familiarity is possible with iEschylus, with Ezekiel, with Dante? 2/0 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. The self îs one's title to egoism. Now, the first thing that those beings do, is to shock the self bf every man. Exorbitant in everything, — in thoughts, in images, in convictions, in émotions, in passion, in faith, — whatever may be the side of yourself to whirfi they address themselves, they dîsturb it They overshoot your intelligence ; they dazzle the inner eye of imagination ; they question and search your conscience; they wrench your deepest sen- sibilities ; they tear your heart-strings ; they sweep away your soûl. The infinité that îs in them passes from them, and multipUes them, and transfigures them before your eyes every moment, — a fearful strain upon the vision! With them, you never know where you are. At every turn you encounter the unfore- seen. You were looking for men only : there come giants who cannot enter your chamber. You expected only an idea : cast down your eyes, for they are the idéal. You expected only eagles : thèse beings hâve six wings, they are seraphs. Are they then beyond Nature? Are they lackîng in humanity? Certainly not ; and far from that, and quite the reverse. We hâve already said, and we insist upon it, Nature and humanity are in them more than in any other beings. They are superhuman men, but * men. Homo sum, This word of a poet sums up ail poetry. Saint Paul strikes his breast, and says, " Peccamus." Job tells you who he is : "I am the son of a woman." They are men. What troubles you is that they are men more than you ; they are too much men. Where you hâve but the part, they WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, 2/1 have the whole; they carry în theîr vast heart entîre humanîty, and they are you more than your- self; you recognîze yourself too much în theîr work, — hence your outcry. To that total of Nature, to that complète humanîty, to that clay whîch is ail your flesh, and which is at the same tîme the whole earth, they add somethîng; and thîs marvellous reflection of the light of unknown suns complètes your terror. They have vîstas of révélation ; and suddenly, and wîthout cryîng " Beware ! " at the moment when you least expect it, they burst the cloud, and make în the zenîth a gap whence falls a ray lîghtîng up the terrestrîal with the celestîal. It îs quîte natural that people should have no great fancy for theîr company, and no taste for neîghborly întîmacy wîth them. Whoever has not a soûl well attempered by a vigorous éducation prefers to avoîd them. For colossal books there must be athletîc readers. To open Jeremîah, Ezekiel, Job, Pindar, Lucretîus, and this Alîghierî, and thîs Shakespeare, one must be robust. Let it be owned that commonplace habits, a vulgar life, the dead calm of the con- science, "good taste" and "common sensé," — ail petty and placid egoism, — are disturbed by the portents of the sublime. Yet, when one plunges in and reads them, nothing is more hospitable for the mind at certain hours than thèse stern spirits. They suddenly as- sume a lofty gentleness, as unexpected as the rest. They say to you, " Come in ! " They receive you at home wîth an archangelic fraternity. They are affectionate, sad, melancholy, consoling. You 2/2 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. are suddenly at your ease. You feel yourself loved by them ; you almost imagine yourself. per- sonally known to them. Their sternness and their pride veil a profound sympathy; if granité had a heart, how deep would its goodness be! Well, genius is granité with goodness. Extrême power goes with great love. They join you in your prayers. Such men know well that God exists. Apply your ear to thèse giants, and you will hear their hearts beat. Would you believe, love, weep, beat your breast, fall upon your knees, raise your hands to heaven with confidence and serenity? Listen to thèse poets: they will aid you to rise toward a wholesome and fruitful sorrow ; they will make you feel the heavenly use of émotion. Oh, goodness of the strong ! Their émotion, which, if they will, can be an earthquake, is at moments so cordial and so gentle that it seems like the rocking of a cradle. They hâve just quickened within you something which they foster tenderly. There is maternity in genius. Advance a step ; a new sur- prise awaits you: thèse poets hâve a grâce like that of Aurora herself. High mountains hâve upon their slopes ail climes, and the great poets ail styles. It is suffi- cient to change the zone. Go up, ît is the tem- pest; descend, the flowers are there. The inner fire accommodâtes itself to the winter without ; the glacier makes an admirable crater; and the lava has no finer outlet than through the snow. A sudden blaze of flame is not strange on a polar summit. This contact of the extrêmes is a law in Nature, in which the theatrical strokes of the sub- WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 273 lime are exhibited at every moment. A moun- tain, a genius, — both possess an austère majesty. Thèse masses evolve a sort of religious intimida- tion. Dante is not less précipitons than Etna; Shakspeare's heights equal the steeps of Chimbo- razo. The summits of the poets are not less cloud- piercing than mountain peaks. There thunders roU; while in the valleys, in passes, in sheltered nooks, at the bottom of canons, are rivulets, birds, nests, foliage, enchantments, extraordinary floras. Above the frightful arch of the Aveyron, in the middle of the Mer de Glace, there is that paradise called " The Garden " — hâve you seen it? What a freak of Nature ! A hot sun, a shade tepid and fresh, a vague exudation of perfumes on the grass-plots, an indescribable month of May per- petually crouching amid précipices. Nothing can be more tender and more exquisite. Such are the poets; such are the Alps. Thèse vast, dreadful heights are marvellous growers of roses and violets. They avail themselves of the dawn and of the dew better than ail your meadows and ail your hills, whose natural business it is. The April of the plain is flat and vulgar compared with their April, and they hâve, those immense old mountains^ in their wildest ravine, their own charming spring-tide well known to the bées. 18 BOOK IV. CRITICISM. CHAPTER I. ALL Shakespeare's plays, with the exception of * Macbeth ' and ' Romeo and Juliet/ — thîrty-four plays out of thirty-six, — offer to the observer one peculiarity which seems to hâve es- caped, up to this day, the most emînent commen- tators and critîcs ; one which is unnoticed by the Schlegels, and even by M. Villemain himself, in his remarkable labors, and of which it is impossible not to speàk. It is the double action which trav- erses the drama and reflects it on a small scale. Beside the tempest in the Atlantic is the tempest in the tea-cup. Thus, Hamlet makes beneath him- self a Hamlet ; he kills Polonius, father of Laertes, — and there stands Laertes over against him ex- actly as he stands over against Claudius. There are two fathers to avenge. There might be two ghosts. So, in 'King Lear/ side by side and simultaneously, Lear, driven to despair by his daughters Goneril and Regan, and consoled by his daughter Cordelia, is repeated in Gloster, WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, 2/5 betrayed by his son Edmund and loved by hîs son Edgar. The îdea bifurcated, the îdea echoîng îtself, a lesser drama copying and elbowing the principal drama, the action attended by îts moon, — a smaller action like ît, — unity eut in two ; surely the fact is a strange one. Thèse double actions hâve been strongly condemned by the few commentators who hâve pointed them out. In this condemnation we do not sympathize. Do we then approve and accept as good thèse double actions? By no means. We recognize them, and that is ail. The drama of Shakespeare — as we said with ail our force as far back as 1827,^ in order to discourage ail imitation — the drama of Shakespeare is peculiar to Shakespeare; it is a drama inhérent in this poet ; it is his own essence ; it is himself. Thence his originalities, which are absolutely personal ; thence his idiosyncrasies, which exist without establishing a law. Thèse double actions are purely Shakespearian. Neither iEschylus nor Molière would admit them ; and we should certainly agrée with iEschylus and Molière. Thèse double actions are, moreover, the sign of the sixteenth century. Each epoch has its own mysterious stamp. The centuries hâve a signature which they affix to masterpîeces, and which ît is necessary to know how to decipher and recognize. The signature of the sixteenth century is not that of the eighteenth. The Renascence was a subtle time, a time of reflection. The spirit of the six- teenth century was reflected in a mîrror. Every 1 Préface to « Cromwell.' 276 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. îdea of the Renascence has a double compartment. Look at the rood-lofts in the churches. The Re- nascence, wîth an exquisite and fantastical art, always makes the Old Testament an adumbration of the New. The double action is there in every- thing. The symbol explains the personage by repeating hîs gesture. If, in a low-relief, Jehovah sacrifices his son, he has for a neighbor, in the next low-relief, Abraham sacrificing his son. Jonah passes three days in the whale, and Jésus passes three days in the sepulchre ; and the jaws of the monster swallowing Jonah answer to the mouth of hell engulfing Jésus. The carver of the rood-loft of Fécamp, so stupidly demolished, goes so far as to give for a counterpart to St. Joseph — whom? Amphitryon. Thèse singular parallels constitute one of the habits of the profound and far-sought art of the sîxteenth century. Nothing can be more curîous in that manner than the use which was made of St. Christopher. In the Middle Ages and in the sixteenth century, in paintings and sculptures. St. Christopher — the good giant martyred by Decius in 250, recorded by the BoUandists and accepted imperturbably by Baillet — is always triple, an opportunity for the triptych. To begin with, there îs a first Christ-bearer, a first Christophorus ; this is Christopher with the infant Jésus on his shoulders. Next, the Virgin with child is a Christopher, since she carries Christ. Lastly, the cross is a Chris- topher; it also carries Christ. This treble illus- tration of the idea is immortalized by Rubens în the cathedral of Antwerp. The twin idea, the WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 277 triple îdea, — such is the stamp of the sîxteenth century. Shakespeare, faîthfui to the spirit of hîs time, must needs add Laertes avenging his father to Hamlet avenging his father, and cause Hamlet to be pursued by Laertes at the same time that Claudius is pursued by Hamlet; he must needs make the filial piety of Edgar a comment on the filial piety of Cordelia, and bring out in contrast, weighed down by the ingratitude of unnatural children, two wretched fathers, each bereaved of one of the two kinds of light, — Lear mad, and Gloster blind. CHAPTER II. What then? No criticisms? No strictures? You explain everything? Yes. Genius is an en- tity like Nature, and requires, like Nature, to be accepted purely and simply. A mountain must be accepted as such, or left alone. There are men who would make a criticism on the Himalayas, pebble by pebble. Mount Etna blazes and sput- ters, throws out its glare, its wrath, its lava, and its ashes; thèse men take scales and weigh thèse ashes, pinch by pinch. Quoi libras in monte summof Meanwhile genius continues its érup- tion. Everything in it has its reason for existing. It is because it is. Its shadow is the under-side of its light. Its smoke comes from its flame. Its précipice is the condition of its height. We love 278 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. thîs more, and that less; but we remaîn silent wherever we feel God. We are in the forest ; the crossed grain of the tree îs its secret. The sap knows what it is doing; the root understands its trade. We take things as they are; we are on good terms with what is excellent, tender, or mag- nificent ; we acquiesce in masterpieces ; we do not make use of one to find fault with the other ; we do not insist that Phidias should sculpture cathe- drals, nor that Pinaigrier should glaze temples. The temple is harmony, the cathedral is mystery ; they are two différent models of the sublime : we do not claim for the minster the perfection of the Parthenon, nor for the Parthenon the grandeur of the minster. We are so far whimsical as to be satisfied if a thing is beautîful. We do not reproach for its sting the insect that gives us honey. We renounce our right to criticise the feet of the peacock, the cry of the swan, the plumage of the nightingale, the larva of the butterfly, the thorn of the rose, the odor of the lion, the hide of the éléphant, the prattle of the cascade, the pips of the orange, the immobility of the Milky Way, the saltness of the océan, the spots on the sun, the nakedness of Noah. The quandoque bonus donnitat is permitted to Horace. We raise no objection. What is certain is that Homer would not say this of Horace, he would not take the trouble. But that eagle would find this chattering humming-bird charming enough. I grant it is pleasant to a man to feel himself supe- rior, and to say, " Homer is puérile, Dante is child- WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 279 îsh." The smile accompanyîng such a remark îs rather becomîng. Why not crush thèse poor ge- niuses a little? To be the Abbé Trublet, and to say, ** Milton îs a schoolboy," îs agreeable. How wîtty îs the man who finds that Shakespeare has no wît ! That man îs La Harpe, Delandine, Auger ; he îs, was, or shall be, an Academician. "AU thèse great men are full of extravagance, bad taste, and childishness." What a fine decîsion to render ! Thèse manners tîckie theîr possessors voluptuously ; and, in reality, when they hâve said, " This gîant îs small," they can fancy that they are great. Every man has hîs own way. As for my- self, the wrîter of thèse lines, I admire everythîng, lîke a fool. That îs why I hâve wrîtten this book. To admire, — to be an enthusiast, — ît has struck me that ît was well to give, în our century, this example of foUy. CHAPTER III. Look, therefore, for no crîtîcîsm. I admire iEschylus, I admire Juvenal, I admire Dante in the mass, in the lump, ail. I do not cavil at those great benefactors. What you characterize as a fault, I call accent I accept, and give thanks. The marvels of the human mind being my inheritance, I claîm no exemption from the liabilities of the succession. Pegasus being given to me, I do not 280 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. look the gift-horse în the mouth. A masterpiece offers me its hospitality: I approach it hat in hand, and I admire the countenance of my host. Gilles Shakespeare, — be it so. I admire Shake- speare, and I admire Gilles. FalstafF is proposed to me, — I accept him, and I admire the " Empty the jorden." I admire the senseless cry, " A rat ! " I admire the quips of Hamlet; I admire the whole- sale murders of Macbeth; I admire the witches, " that ridiculous spectacle ; " I admire " the but- tock of the night ; " I admire the eye plucked from Gloucester. I hâve no more intelligence than that comes to. Having recently had the honor to be called " silly" by several distinguished writers and crîtîcs, and even by my illustrions friend M. de Lamar- tine,^ I am determined to justify the epithet We close with a final observation of détail which we hâve specially to make regarding Shakespeare. Orestes, that fatal senior of Hamlet, is not, as we hâve said, the sole link between iEschylus and Shakespeare ; we hâve noted a relation, less easily perceptible, between Prometheus and Hamlet The mysterious intimacy between the two poets appears, with référence to this same Prometheus, still more strangely striking in a particular which, up to this time, has escaped the notice of observers and critics. Prometheus is the grandsîre of Mab. Let us prove it. Prometheus, like ail personages who hâve be- ^ " The whole biography, sometimes rather iJuerile, even rather silly, of Bishop Myriel." — Lamartine : Course in Literature (Dis» course lxxxiv,),p. 385. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 28 1 corne legendary, — like Solomon, like Caesar, like Mahomet, like Charlemagne, like the Cid, like Joan of Arc, like Napoléon, — has a double con- tinuation, the one in history, the other in fable. Now, the continuation of Prometheus în the fable is this : — Prometheus, creator of men, îs also creator of spirits. He is father of a dynasty of Divs, whose filiation the old metrical romances hâve preserved : Elf, that is to say, the Rapid, son of Prometheus ; then Elfin, king of India; then Elfinan, founder of Cleopolis, town of the fairies; then Elfilin, builder of the golden wall ; then Elfinell, winner of the battle of the démons; then Elfant, who built Panthea ail în crystal ; then Elfar, who killed Bicephalus and Tricephalus; then Elfinor, the magian, a kind of Salmoneus, who built over the sea a bridge of copper, sounding like thunder, " non imitabîle fulmen aère et cornipedum pulsu simularet equorum ; '* then seven hundred princes ; then Elficleos the Sage ; then Elferon the Beautî- ful; then Oberon; then Mab. Wonderful fable, which, with a profound meaning, unités the sî- dereal and the microscopic, the infinitely great and the infinitely small. And it is thus that the animalcule of Shake- speare îs connected with the giant of iEschylus. The fairy, — drawn athwart men*s noses as they lie asleep, în her chariot covered with the wîngs of grasshoppers, by eight little atomîes harnessed with moonbeams and whipped with a lash of film, — the fairy atom has for ancestor the huge Titan, robber of stars, nailed on the Caucasus,, having 282 ^ WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. one hand on the Caspîan Gates, the other on the Gates of Ararat, one heel on the source of the Phasis, the other on the Validus-Murus, closing the passage between the mountain and the sea, — a colossus whose vast profile of shadow was pro- jected by the sun, according to îts rising or settîng, now over Europe as far as Corinth, now over Asîa as far as Bangalore. Nevertheless, Mab — who is also called Tanaquîl — has ail the wavering inconsîstency of a dream. Under the name of Tanaquil she îs the wife of the elder Tarquin, and she spins for young Servius Tullîus the first tunic worn by a young Roman after leaving ofT the praetexta ; Oberon, who turns eut to be Numa, is her uncle. In 'Huon de Bordeaux' she îs called Gloriande, and has for a lover Julius Caesar, and Oberon is her son; in Spenser she is called Gloriana, and Oberon is her father ; in Shakespeare she is called Titania, and Oberon is her husband. This name, Titania, connects Mab with the Titan, and Shakespeare with iEschylus. CHAPTER IV. An emînent man of our day, a celebrated his- torian, a powerful orator, an earlier translator of Shakespeare, is in our opinion mistaken when he regrets, or appears to regret, the slight influence of Shakespeare upon the théâtre of the nineteenth WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 283 century. We cannot share that regret. An in- fluence of any sort, even that of Shakespeare, could but mar the originality of the literary move- ment of our epoch. " The System of Shakespeare," says thîs honorable and grave writer, with référ- ence to that movement, " may furnîsh, ît seems to me, the plans after which genius must henceforth work." We hâve never been of that opinion, and we said so, in anticipation, forty years ago.^ For us, Shakespeare is a genius, and not a System. On thîs point we hâve already explained our views, and we mean soon to explain them at greater length ; but let us say now that what Shakespeare has done, is done once for ail. There is no revert- îng to it. Admire or criticise, but do not recast. It is finished. A distinguished critic, recently deceased, M. Chaudesaigues, lays stress on this reproach. " Shakespeare," says he, " has been revived with- out being foUowed. The romantic school has not imitated Shakespeare; that is its fault." That is its merit. It is blamed for this; we praise it The contemporary théâtre, such as it is, is itself^ The contemporary théâtre has for device, " Sum, non sequor." It belongs to no " System." It has its own law, and it fulfils this law; it has its own life, and it lives this life. The drama of Shakespeare expresses man at a given moment. Man passes away; this drama remains, having as its eternal background life, the heart, the world, and as its foreground the sixteenth century. This drama can neither be 1 Préface to ' Cromwell.' 284 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, contînued nor begun anew. Another âge, another art. The théâtre of our day has no more followed Shakespeare than ît has followed iEschylus ! And without enumerating ail the other reasons that we shall note farther on, how perplexed would he be who wished to imitate and copy, in making a choice between thèse two poets! iEschylus and Shakespeare seem made to prove that contraries may be admirable. The point of departure of the one is absolutely opposite to the point of de- parture of the other. ^Eschylus is concentration, Shakespeare îs diffusion. One deserves applause because he is condensed, and the other because he is dispersed ; to iEschylus unity, to Shakespeare ubiquity. Between them they divide God. And as such intelligences are always complète, one feels in the unit drama of iEschylus the free agi- tation of passion, and in the diffusîve drama of Shakespeare the convergence of ail the rays of life. The one starts from unity and reaches the multiple; the other starts from the multiple and arrives at unity. The évidence of this is striking, especially when we compare 'Hamlet' with * Orestes.' Extra- ordinary double page, obverse and reverse of the same idea, which seems written expressly to prove how true it is that two différent geniuses, making the same thing, will make two différent things. It is easy to see that the théâtre of our day has, rightly or wrongly, traced out its own way be- tween Greek unity and Shakespearian ubiquity. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, 2%$ CHAPTER V. Let us set asîde, for the présent, the question of contemporary art, and take up again the gênerai question. Imitation is always barren and bad. As for Shakespeare, — since Shakespeare is the poet who claims our attention now, — he is in the highest degree a genius human and gênerai ; but, like every true genius, he is at the same time an îdiosyncratic and a personal mind. Axiom: the poet starts from his own inner self to corne to us. It is that which makes the poet inimitable. Examine Shakespeare, fathom him, and see how determined he is to be himself. Expect from hîm no concession. He is certainly not selfish, but what he does he does of deliberate choice. He commands his art, — within the limits, of course, of his proper work. For neither the art of iEschylus, nor the art of Aristophanes, nor the art of Plautus, nor the art of Macchiavelli, nor the art of Calderon, nor the art of Molière, nor the art of Beaumarchais, nor any of the forms of art, deriving life each of them from the spécial life of a man of genius, would obey the orders given by Shakespeare. Art thus under- stood is vast equality and profound liberty; the région of equals is also the région of the free. It is an élément of Shakespeare's grandeur that he cannot be taken as a model. In order to realize his idiosyncrasy, open one of his plays, — no matter 286 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. whîch, — ît îs always, foremost and above ail, Shakespeare. What more personal than 'Troilus and Cres- sîda ' ? A comic Troy ! Hère is * Much Ado about Nothîng/ — a tragedy which ends with a burst of laughter. Hère is * The Winter's Taie ' — a pastoral drama. Shakespeare is at home in his work. Would you see a despotism? — consider his imagination. What arbitrary détermination to dream! What despotic resolution in his dizzy flight! What absoluteness in his indécision and wavering ! The dream fills some of his plays to such a degree that man changes his nature, and becomes a cloud rather than a man. Angelo in * Measure for Measure * is a misty tyrant. He be- comes disintegrated, and wears away. Leontes in ' The Winter's Taie ' is an Othello who fades out. In * Cymbeline ' one thinks that lachimo will be- come an lago; but he dissolves. The dream is there, — everywhere. Watch Manilius, Posthumus, Hermione, Perdita, passing by. In * The Tempest ' the Duke of Milan has " a brave son,'* who is like a dream within a dream. Ferdinand alone speaks of him, and no one but Ferdinand seems to hâve seen him. A brute becomes reasonable: witness the constable Elbow in * Measure for Measure.' An idiot comes suddenly by his wits: witness Cloten in * Cymbeline.' A king of Sicily is jealous of a king of Bohemia. Bohemia has a sea-coast ; the shepherds pick up children there. Theseus, a duke, espouses Hippolyta, the Amazon. Oberon comes în also. For hère it is Shakespeare's will to dream ; elsewhere he thinks. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 28/ We say more : where he dreams, he stîll thînks ; wîth a profundity diflferent, but not inferior. Let men of genius remain in peace in their ori- gînalîty. There is something wild in thèse mysterî- ous civilizers. Even in their comedy, even in their buffoonery, even in their laughter, even in their smile, there is the unknown. In them is felt the sacred dread that belongs to art, and the all-power- ful terror of the îmaginary mingled wîth the real. Each of them is in his cavern, alone. They hear each other from afar, but never copy. We are not aware that the hippopotamus imitâtes the roar of the éléphant. Lions do not ape each other. Diderot does not recast Bayle; Beaumarchais does not copy Plautus, and has no need of Davus to create Figaro; Piranesi îs not inspired by Daedalus; Isaiah does not begin again the work of Moses. One day, at St. Helena, M. de las Casas said, " Sire, had I been like you, master of Prussia, I should hâve taken the sword of Frederick the Great from the tomb at Potsdam, and I should hâve worn ît." " Fool," replied Napoléon, " I had my own." Shakespeare*s work is absolute, sovereign, im- perious, eminently solitary, unneighborly, sublime in radiance, absurd in reflection, and must remain without a copy. To îmitate Shakespeare would be as insane as to imitate Racine would be stupid. 288 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. CHAPTER VI. Let us agrée, by the way, respectîng a désigna- tion much used on every hand, — " profanum vul- gus," a Word of a poet emphasîzed by pédants. Thîs " profanum vulgus " seems to be everybody's missile. Let us fix the meaning of this word. What îs the " vulgar herd " ? The school says, " It is the people." And we, for our part, say, " It îs the school." But let us first define this expression, " the school." When we say " the school," what must be understood? Let us explaîn. The school is the résultant of pedantry ; the school is the liter- ary excrescence of the budget; the school is in- tellectual mandarinship governing in the varions authorized and officiai teachings, either of the press or of the state, from the theatrical feuilleton of the préfecture to the biographies and encyclo- paedias duly examined and stamped and hawked about, and made sometimes, by way of refinement, by republicans agreeable to the police ; the school is the classic and scholastic orthodoxy, with its unbroken girdle of walls, Homeric and Virgilian antiquity traded upon by officiai and licensed lit- eratiy — a sort of China calling itself Greece ; the school îs, summed up in one concrétion which forms part of public order, ail the knowledge of pédagogues, ail the history of historiographers, ail the poetry of lauréates, ail the philosophy of WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 289 sophists, ail the crîticism of pédants, ail the férules of the teachîng friars, ail the religion of bigots, ail the modesty of prudes, ail the metaphysîcs of par- tisans, ail the justice of placéVnen, ail the old âge of dapper young men bereft of their virility, ail the flattery of courtiers, ail the diatribes of censer- bearers, ail the independence of flunkeys, ail the certitudes of short sights and of base soûls. The school hâtes Shakespeare. It detects him in the very act of mingling with the people, going to and fro in public thoroughfares, " trivial," having a Word for every man, speaking the language of the people, uttering the human cry like any other, accepted by those whom he accepts, applauded by hands black with tar, cheered by the hoarse throats of ail those who corne from labor and from weariness. The drama of Shakespeare îs for the people ; the school îs indignant, and says, ** Odî profanum vulgus." There îs demagogy in this poetry roaming at large ; the author of * Hamlet ' " panders to the mob." Be ît so. The poet " panders to the mob." If anything îs great, ît îs that. In the foreground everywhere, in full lîght, amidst the flourish of trumpets, are the powerful men, followed by the gîlded men. The poet does not see them, or, if he does, he disdains them. He lifts his eyes and looks at God ; then he drops his eyes and looks at the people. There in the depths of shadow, wellnigh invisible by reason of its submersion in darkness, is that fatal crowd, that vast and mournful heap of suflfering, that vénérable populace of the tattered and of the ignorant,— 19 290 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. a chaos of soûls. That crowd of heads undulates obscurely lîke the waves of a nocturnal sea. From tîme to time there pass over that surface, like squalls over the water, catastrophes, — a war, a pestilence, a royal favorite, a famine, This causes a tremor of but brief duratîon, the deeps of sor- row being calm, like the deeps of the sea. Despair leaves în the soûl a dreadful weight, as of lead. The last word of the abyss is stupor. This is the night. Such is, beneath the mournful glooms amid which ail is indistinct, the sombre sea of the poor. Thèse burdened ones are silent ; they know nothing, they can do nothing, they think nothing : they simply endure. Plectuntur Achivi. They are.hungry and cold. Their indélicate flesh ap- pears through their tatters. Who makes those tatters? The purple. The nakedness of virgins cornes from the nudity of odalisques. From the twisted rags pf the daughters of the people fall pearls for the Fontanges and the Châteauroux. It îs famine that gilds Versailles. The whole of this living and dying shadow moves; thèse spectral forms are in the pangs of death; the mother's breast is dry, the father has no work, the brain has no light. If there îs a book in that destitution it resembles the pitcher, so insipid or corrupt is what it offers to the thirst of the mind. Mournful households ! The group of the little ones îs wan. Thîs whole mass expires and creeps, not having even the power to love; and perhaps unknown to them, whîle they bow and submit, from ail that vast WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, 29 1 unconscîousness în whîch Rîght dwells, from the inartîculate murmur of those wretched breaths mingled together proceeds an indescribable, con- fused voîce, a mysterious fog of expression, suc- ceedîng, syllable by syllable in the darkness, in utterîng wonderful words : Future, Humanity, Liberty, Equality, Progress. And the poet lis- tens, and he hears; and he looks, and he sees; and he bends lower and lower, and he weeps ; and then, growing with a strange growth, drawing from ail that darkness hîs own transfiguration, he stands erect, terrible and tender, above ail thèse wretched ones — those of high place as well as those of low — wîth flaming eyes. And with a loud voîce he demands a reckonîng. And he says. Hère îs the effect! And he says, Hère is the cause! Lîght îs the remedy. Erii- dimini, He îs like a great vase fuU of humanity shaken by the hand within the cloud, from which should fall to earth great drops, — fire for the oppressors, dew for the oppressed. Ah ! you deem that an evîl? Well, we, for our part, approve it. It seems to us rîght that some one should speak when ail are suflferîng. The ignorant who enjoy and the ignorant who suflfer hâve equal need of instruction. The law of fraternity is derived from the law of labor. The practice of killing one another has had îts day; the hour has come for loving one another. It îs to promulgate thèse truths that the poet îs good. For that, he must be of the people; for that, he must be of the populace: that îs to say, the poet, as he leads in progress, should not draw back before the elbow- 292 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, ing of facts, however ugly the facts may be. The actual distance between the real and the idéal cannot otherwise be measured. Besides, to drag the bail and chain a little complètes a Vincent de Paul. To Steel themselves, therefore, to promîs- cuous contact with trivial things, to the popular metaphor, to the great lîfe in common with those exiles from joy who are called the poor, — such îs the first duty of poets. It is useful, it is necessary, that the breath of the people should traverse thèse all-powerful soûls. The people hâve somethîng to say to them. It is good that there should be in Eurîpîdes a flavor of the herb-dealers of Athens, and in Shakespeare of the sailors of London. Sacrifice to "the mob/' O poet! Sacrifice to that unfortunate, disînherîted, vanquished, vaga- bond, shoeless, famished, repudiated, despaîring mob ; sacrifice to it, if it must be and when ît must be, thy repose, thy fortune, thy joy, thy country, thy liberty, thy life. The mob îs the human race in misery. The mob is the mournful beginning of the people. The mob is the great victim of dark- ness. Sacrifice to it! Sacrifice thyself! Let thy- self be hunted, let thyself be exiled like Voltaire to Ferney, like D'Aubigné to Geneva, like Dante to Verona, like Juvenal to Syene, like Tacitus to Methymna, like iEschylus to Gela, like John to Patmos, like Elijah to Horeb, like Thucydides to Thrace, like Isaiah to Ezion-geber! Sacrifice to the mob. Sacrifice to it thy gold, and thy blood which is more than thy gold, and thy thought which is more than thy blood, and thy love which îs more than thy thought; sacrifice to it every- WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 293 thîng except justice. Receîve îts complaint; lîsten to it touching its faults and touching the faults of others ; hear its confession and îts accu- sation. Give it thy ear, thy hand, thy arm, thy heart. Do everything for it, excepting evil. Alas ! it suffers so much, and it knows nothing. Correct it, warn it, instruct it, guide it, train it. Put it to the school of honesty. Make it spell truth, show it the alphabet of reason, teach it to read virtue, probity, generosity, mercy. Hold thy book wide open. Be there, attentive, vigilant, kind, faithful, humble. Light up the braîn, inflame the mind, extinguish selfishness; and thyself give the ex- ample. The poor are privation ; be thou abnéga- tion. Teach ! irradiate ! they need thee ; thou art their great thirst. To learn îs the first step; to lîve is but the second. Be at their command: dost thou hear? Be ever there in the form of light! For it is beautiful on this sombre earth, during this dark Hfe, brief passage to something be- yond, — it is beautiful that Force should hâve Right for a master, that Progress should hâve Courage as a leader, that Intelligence should hâve Honor as a sovereign, that Conscience should hâve Duty as a despot, that Civilization should hâve Liberty as a queen, and that the servant of Ignorance should be the Light. w BOOK V. THE MINDS AND THE MASSES. CHAPTER I. MEMORABLE thîngs hâve been donc during the last eîghty years. The pavement îs cluttered with the rubbish of a vast démolition. What is done is but little compared with what remaîns to be done. To destroy, is mère task-work ; the work of the artist îs to build. Progress demolishes with the left hand ; it is with the rîght hand that ît builds. The left hand of Progress is called Force; the rîght hand is called Mind. A great deal of usefui destruction has, up to thîs hour, been accomplished ; ail the old cumbersome cîvilization îs, thanks to our fathers, cleared away. It îs well; ît is finîshed, ît is thrown down, it is on the ground. Up, now, O intelligences! gird yourselves for work, for travail, for fatigue, for duty ; it becomes necessary to construct. Hère are three questions, — To construct what? To construct where? To construct how? WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 295 We reply, — To construct the people. To construct ît according to the laws of progress. To construct it by means of light. CHAPTER II. To work for the people, — thîs îs the great and urgent need. It is important, at the présent tîme, to bear în mînd that the human soûl has still greater need of the îdeal than of the real. It is by the real that we exist ; it îs by the îdeal that we live. Would you realîze the différence? Animais exist, man lives.^ To live, îs to understand. To live, is to smile at the présent ; it is to be able to see over the wall of the future. To live, is to hâve in one's self a balance, and to weigh in ît good and evil. To live, is to hâve justice, truth, reason, dévotion, probity, sincerity, common-sense, right, and duty welded to the heart. To live, îs to know what one is worth, what one can do and should do. Life is conscience. Cato would not rise before Ptolemy. Cato really lived. Lîterature secrètes cîvîlizatîon, poetry secrètes the idéal. That is why lîterature is one of the ^ Perhaps it should be noted that, în the original, existence is made the higher, more absolute mode of being; e.^.^ "Les anî- maax vivent, Tbomme existe." — Tr, . 296 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, wants of socîeties ; that îs why poetry is a hunger of the soûl. That is why poets are the first instructors of the people. That îs why Shakespeare must be translatée! în France. That îs why Molîère must be translatée! în England. That is why comments must be made on them. That îs why there must be a vast public literary domain. That is why ail the poets, ail the philo^ophers, ail the thinkers, ail the producers of nobility of soûl must be translated, commented on, published, printed, reprînted, stereotyped, distributed, hawked about, explained, recîted, spread abroad, given to ail, given cheaply, given at cost price, given for nothing. Poetry evolves heroîsm. M. Royer-CoUard, that original and îronical friend of routine, was, taken for ail in ail, a wise and noble spirit. Some one we know heard him say one day, ** Spartacus is a poeL'* That dreadful and consoling Ezekiel, the tragic revealer of progress, has ail kinds of singular pas- sages fuU of a profound meaning: "The voice said to me, Fill thine hand with coals of fire from between the cherubim, and scatter them over the city." And elsewhere: "The spirit having gone into them, whithersoever the spirit was to go they went." And again: "Behold, a hand was sent unto me; and lo, a roU of a book was therein. The voice said unto me : Eat thîs roU. Then did WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 297 I eat ît; and it was in my mouth as honey for sweetness."^ To eat the book is a strange and strikîng image, embodyîng the whole formula of perfectîbility, whîch îs made up of knowledge above, and of instruction below. We hâve just said : " Lîterature secrètes civîlîza- tion." Do y ou doubt ît? Open the first statistics you corne across. Hère is one fact whîch we find under our hand : Toulon Penîtentîary, 1862. Three thousand and ten prisoners. Of thèse three thousand and ten convicts, forty know a little more than to read and Write, two hundred and eighty-seven know how to read and write, nine hundred and four read badly and Write badly, seventeen hundred and seventy- nine can neither read nor write. In this wretched crowd, ail the merely mechanical trades are repre- sented by numbers decreasing as you rise toward the enlightened professions; and you arrive at this final resuit, — goldsmiths and jewellers in the prison, four ; ecclesiastics, three ; attorneys, two ; actors, one; musicians, one; men of letters, not one. The transformation of the crowd înto the people, — profound task ! It is to this labor that the men called Socialists hâve devoted themselves during the last forty years. The author of this book, however insignificanthe may be, is one of the oldest in this labor. ' The Last Day of a Condemned Pris- oner' dates from 1828, and 'Claude Gueux' from 1834. If he claims his place among thèse philoso- ^ In this passage, as elsewhere, the quotations appear to be madc from memory. -- Tr. 298 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, phers, ît is because it is a place of persécution. A certain hatred of Socialism, very blind, but very gênerai, has raged for fifteen or sixteen years, and is still raging most bitterly among the înfluential classes (classes, then, are still in existence?). Let it not be forgotten that true Socialism has for its end the élévation of the masses to the civic dignity, and that, therefore, its principal care is for moral and intellectual cultivation. The first hunger is ignorance ; Socialism wishes, then, above ail, to instruct. That does not hinder Socialism from being calumniated, and Socialists from being denounced. To most of the infuriated tremblers who hâve the public ear at the présent moment, thèse reformers are public enemies ; they are guilty of everything that has gone wrong. " O Romans ! " saîd Tertullian, " we are just, kind, thinking, lettered, honest men. We meet to pray, and we love you because you are our brethren. We are gentle and peaceable like little children, and we wish for concord among men. Neverthe- less, O Romans, if the Tiber overflows, or if the Nile does not, you cry, *To the lions with the Christians ! ' " CHAPTER III. The démocratie idea, the new bridge of cîvîlîza- tion, is just now undergoing the formidable trial of overweight. Every other idea would certainly give way under the load that it is made to bean WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, 299 Democracy proves îts solidîty by the absurdîtîes that are heaped upon it without shakîng it. It must bear everything that people choose to place upon it. At this moment they are attempting to make it carry despotism. ** The people hâve no need of liberty," — such was the password of a certain innocent but deluded school» the head of which has been dead some years. That poor honest dreamer sincerely be- lieved that progress can continue without freedom. We hâve heard him put forth, probably without in- tention, this aphorism : ** Freedom is good for the rîch/' Such maxims hâve the disadvantage of not being prejudicial to the establishment of empires. No, no, no ; nothing without freedom ! Servitude îs the soûl blinded. Can you picture to yourself a man voluntarily blind ? This terrible thing exists. There are willing slaves. A smile in irons! Can anything be more hideous? He who is not free îs not a man ; he who is not free has no sight, no knowledge, no discernment, no growth, no compréhension, no will, no faith, no love; he has no wife and children, he has only a female with young: he lives not. Ab luce principium, Freedom is the apple of the eye; freedom is the visual organ of progress. To attempt, because freedom has înconveniences and even périls, to produce civilization without it, would be like attempting to cultivate the ground without the sun, — which îs also a not unexcep- tîonable star. One day, in the too beautiful summer of 1829, a critic, now forgotten, — and wrongly, for he was not without some talent, — M. P., feeling 300 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. too warm, exclaîmed as he mended hîs pen : " I am goîng to write down the sun." Certain social théories, yery distinct from Socîal- îsm as we understand it and désire ît, hâve gone astray. Let us discard ail that resembles the con- vent, the barrack, the cell, and the straight Une. Paraguay minus the Jesuits is Paraguay just the same. To give a new shape to the evil is not a useful task. To remodel the old slavery would be stupid. Let the nations of Europe beware of a despotism made anew from materials whîch to some extent they hâve themselves supplied. Such a thing, cemented with a spécial philosophy, mîght easily endure. We hâve just mentioned the theorists, some of them otherwise upright and sincère, who, through fear of a dispersion of activities and éner- gies, and of what they call " anarchy," hâve arrived at an almost Chinese acceptance of absolute social centralization. They turn their résignation into a doctrine. Provided man eats and drinks, ail îs right. The happiness of the beast is the solution. But this is a happiness which others might call by a différent name. We dream for nations somethîng besîdes a felicity made up solely of obédience. The bastinado sums up that sort of fçlicity for the Turkish fellah, the knout for the Russian serf, and the cat-o'-nîne-tails for the English soldier. Thèse Socialists outside of Socialism dérive from Joseph de Maistre and from Ancillon, perhaps without suspecting it ; for thèse ingenious theorists, the partisans of the " deed accomplished," hâve — or fancy they hâve — dém- ocratie intentions, and speak energetîcally of " the WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, 30I prînciples of '89." Let thèse învoluntary philoso- phers of a possible despotism reflect that to îndoc- trinate the masses agaînst freedom, to allow appetite and fatalism to get a hold upon the minds of men, to saturate them with materialîsm and expose them to the results, — thîs would be to understand pro- gress in the fashîon of that worthy man who ap- plauded a new gibbet and exclaîmed, "Excellent! We hâve had till now only an old wooden gallows ; but times hâve changed for the better, and hère we are with a good stone gibbet, whîch wîU do for our children and our grandchîldren ! " CHAPTER IV. To enjoy a fuU stomach, a satîsfied digestion, a satiated belly, is doubtless something, for it is the enjoyment of the brute. However, one may set one's ambition higher. Certainly, a good salary is a fine thîng. To hâve beneath one's feet the firm ground of good wages, is pleasant. The wise man likes to want nothing. To assure his own position is the char- acteristic of an intelligent man. An officiai chair, with ten thousand sesterces a year, is a graceful and convenient seat; libéral émoluments give a fresh complexion and good health ; one lives to an old âge in pleasant well-paid sinécures; the high financial world, abounding in profits, is a place agreeable to live in; to be on a good footing at 302 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. court settles a famîly well and brings a fortune. As for myself, I prefer to ail thèse solid comforts the old leaky vessel în which Bishop Quodvultdeus embarks wîth a smile. There is something beyond satisfyîng one's ap- petîte. The goal of man îs not the goal of the animal. A moral lift îs necessary. The life of nations, like the life of individuals, has its moments of de- pression; thèse moments pass, certainly, but no trace of them ought to remain. Man, at this day, tends to fall înto the stomach: man must be re- placed in the heart, man must be replaced în the brain. The brain, — this is the bold sovereîgn that must be restored! The social question requires to-day, more than ever, to be examined on the side of human dignity. To show man the human goal; to amelîorate intelligence first, the animal afterward ; to contemn the flesh as long as the thought is despised, and to set the example upon their own flesh, — such îs the actual, immédiate, urgent duty of writers. This is what men of genius hâve done at ail times. You ask în what poets can be useful. Simply this, — în permeating civilization wîth lîght. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 303 CHAPTER V. Up to thîs day there has been a lîterature for the lettered. In France particularly, as we hâve already saîd, literature tended to form a caste. To be a poet was something like being a mandarin. Words dîd not ail belong by rîght to the language ; regîstration was granted or refused by the dictio- nary. The dîctîonary had a wîU of îts own. Imag- ine the botanîst declarîng to a vegetable that ît does not exîst, and Nature timîdly offerîng an în- sect to entomology which refuses it as incorrect ! Imagine astrononiy cavilling at the stars! We recoUect having heard an academician, now dead, say before the fuU Academy that French had been spoken in France only in the seventeenth century, and then for but twelve years, — we no longer re- coUect which years. Let us abandon — for it is tîme — this order of ideas; democracy requires it. The présent enlargement of thought demands something else. Let us forsake the collège, the conclave, the cell, trivial tastes, trivial art, the trivial chapel. Poetry is not a coterie. An effort is now being made to galvanize things that are defunct. Let us strive against this tendency. Let us însist on the truths that are urgent The masterpieces recom- mended by the manual for the bachelorship, com- pliments în verse and in prose, tragédies servîng merely as canopies over the head of some king, 304 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. inspiration în full dress, decorated big-wigs laying down the laws of poetry, the manuals of poetic art whîch forget La Fontaine and for which Molière is a "perhaps," the Planats emasculating the Cor- neilles, prudish tongues, thought shut in between the four walls of Quintilian, Longinus, Boileau, and La Harpe: ail this — although the officiai public instruction is soaked and saturated with it — ail this is of the past. A certain epoch called the great century — which was certainly, for litera- ture, a fine century — is after ail, at bottom, noth- ing but a literary monologue. Is it possible to realize such a thing, — a literature whîch is an aside? A dertain form of art seems to bear upon îts pediment the legend, "No admittance." As for ourselves, we understand poetry only with the door wide open. The hour has struck for hoisting the "AU for AU." What is needed by civUiza- tion, henceforth a grown-up matron, is a popular literature. The year 1832 opened a debate, on the surface literary, at bottom social and human. The time has come to conclude the debate. We conclude it in favor of a literature having in view this goal: "The People." Thirty-one years ago the author of thèse pages wrote, in the préface to * Lucretia Borgia,' a word often repeated since : " The poet feels the burden of soûls." Were it worth while, he would add hère that, possible error apart, this utterance of his con- science has been the rule of his life. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 3OS CHAPTER VI. MacCHIAVELLI cast upon the people a strange glance. To heap the measure, to overflow the cup, to exaggerate the horror of the prince's deed, to make the burden more crushing in order to make the revolt more certain, to cause îdolatry to grow înto exécration, to push the masses to extremities, — such seems to be hîs policy. His Yes signifies No. He charges despotism to the muzzle in order to explode it ; the tyrant becomes in his hands a hideous projectile which will shatter itself. Mac- chiavelli conspires. Forwhom? Againstwhom? Guess ! Hîs apotheosis of kings is thus the thing to make régicides. On the head of hîs Prince he places a diadem of crimes, a tiara of vices, a halo of baseness, and he invites you to adore his mon- ster with the air of a man expecting an avenger. He glorifies evil with a sidelong glance toward the shadow where Harmodius lurks. Macchiavelli, this getter up of princely outrages, this servant of the Medici and of the Borgias, had in his youth been put to the rack for admiring Brutus and Cas- sius. He had perhaps plotted with the Soderini for the deliverance of Florence. Does he remem- ber this? Does he continue? His advice is fol- lowed, like the lightning, by a low rumbling in the cloud, an alarming réverbération. What did he mean to say? Against whom'has he a design? Is the advice for or against hîm to whom he gives ît? One day at Florence, in the garden of Cosmo 306 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. Ruccelaî, there being présent the Duke of Mantua and John de' Medici, who afterward commanded the Black Bands of Tuscany, Varchî, the enemy of Macchiavelli, heard the latter say to the two princes, " Let the people read no book, not even mine." It îs curious to compare with thîs remark the advice given by Voltaire to the Duc de Choiseul, — at once advice to the minister, and in- sinuation for the Kîng : " Let the noodles read our nonsense ; there îs no danger in reading, my lord. What can a great monarch like the King of France fear? The people are but rabble, and the books are but trash." Let them read nothing — let them read everything. Thèse two pièces of contrary ad- vice coincide more than one would think. Vol- taire with hidden claws is purring at the feet of the King. Voltaire and Macchiavelli are two for- midable, indirect revolutionists, dissimilar in every- thing, and yet really identical by their profound hatred disguised as flattery of their master. The one îs sly, the other is sinister. The princes of the sîxteenth century had as theorîst upon their infamies, and as enigmatical courtier, Macchiavelli, a dark enthusiast. It is a dreadful thing to be flattered by a sphinx ! Better to be flattered, like Louis XV., by a cat. Conclusion : Make the people read Macchiavelli, and make them read Voltaire. Macchiavelli will inspire them with horror, and Voltaire with contempt, for crowned guilt. But the hearts should turn, above ail, toward the grand, pure poets, be they sweet like Virgil, or bitter like Juvenal. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 307 CHAPTER VIL The progress of man through intellectual ad- vancement : there îs no safety but in that. Teach ! learn! AU the révolutions of the future are en- closed and engulfed in this phrase : Gratuitous and obligatory instruction. This large schéme of intellectual instruction should be crowned by the exposition of works of the first order. The highest place to the men of genius ! Wherever there îs a gathering of men, there ought to be, in a spécial place, a public expositor of the great thinkers. By a great thinker we mean a beneficent thinker. The perpétuai présence of the beautiful in their Works makes the poets the highest of teachers. No one can foresee the quantity of light that will be evolved by placing the people in commu- nication with men of genius. The combination of the heart of the people with the heart of the poet will be the voltaic pile of civilization. Will the people understand this magnificent teachîng? Certainly. We know of nothing too high for the people. The soûl of the people is great. Hâve you ever gone, of a holiday, to a théâtre open gratuitously to ail? What do you thînk of that audience. Do you know of any other more spontaneous and intelligent? Do you know, even in the foresti a vibration more pro- 308 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. found? The court of Versailles admires like a well-drilled régiment; the people throw them- selves passionately into the beautifuL They pack together, crowd, amalgamate, combine, and knead themselves in the théâtre, — a living paste, which the poet is about to mould. The powerful thumb of Molière will presently make its mark on it; the nail of Corneille will scratch this shapeless mass. Whence does that mass come? From the Cour- tille, from the Torcherons, from the Cunette; it is barefoot, barearmed, ragged. Silence! This îs the raw material of humanity.^ The house is crowded ; the vast multitude looks, listens,' loves ; ail consciences, deeply moved, throw out their internai fire ; ail eyes glisten ; the huge, thousand-headed beast is there, the Mob of Burke, the Plebs of Titus Livius, the Fex Urbis of Cicero. It caresses the beautiful, smiling at it with the grâce of a woman. It îs literary in the most refined sensé of the word; nothing equals the delicacy of this monster. The tumultuous crowd trembles, blushes, palpitâtes; its modesty is sur- prising : the crowd is a virgin. No prudery, how- ever; this créature is no fool. It is wanting in no kind of sympathy; it has in îtself the whole keyboard, from passion to irony, from sarcasm to the sob. Its pity is more than pity, it is real mercy. God is felt in it. Suddenly the sublime passes, and the sombre electricity of the deep instantly arouses ail that mass of hearts ; enthusi- asm Works its transfiguration. And now, îs the 1 The places mentioned are banlieuesy or low quarters of Paris, full of drinking-dens. — Tr. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 309 enemy at the gâtes? îs the country în danger? Give the word to this populace, and ît will re-enact Thermopylae. What has produced this transfor- mation ? Poetry. The multitude — and in this lies their grandeur — are profoundly open to the idéal. When they come in contact with lofty art they are pleased, they palpitate. Not a détail escapes them. The crowd is one liquid and living expanse capable of vibration. A mob is a sensitive-plant. Contact with the beautiful stirs ecstatically the surface of multitudes, — a sure sign that the deeps are sounded. A rustling of leaves — a mysterious passing breath — the crowd trembles beneath the sacred insufflation of the deep. And even when the man of the people îs not of the crowd, he is still a good auditor of great things. His ingenuousness is honest, his curiosity healthy. Ignorance is a longing. His near rela- tion with Nature renders him open to the holy émotion of the true. He has secret absorbents for poetry which he himself does not suspect. Every kind of instruction is due to the people. The more divine the light, the more is it made for this simple soûl. We would hâve in every village a chair from which Homer should be explaîned to the peasants. 3IO WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. CHAPTER VIIL Excessive devotîon to the materîal îs the evîl of our epoch ; hence a certain sluggîshness. The great problem îs to restore to the human mînd something of the idéal. Whence shall we draw the idéal ? Wherever it is to be found. The poets, the philosophers, the thînkers are îts urns. The idéal is in iEschylus, in Isaiah, in Juvenal, in Alighieri, in Shakespeare. Throw^Eschylus, throw Isaiah, throw Juvenal, throw Dante, throw Shake- speare into the deep soûl of the human race. Pour Job, Solomon, Pindar, Ezekiel, Sophocles, Eurîpides, Herodotus, Theocritus, Plautus, Lucre- tîus, Virgil, Terence, Horace, CatuUus, Tacitus, Saint Paul, Saint Augustîne, Tertullian, Petrarch, Pascal, Milton, Descartes, Corneille, La Fontaine, Montes- quieu, Diderot, Rousseau, Beaumarchais, Sedaine, André Chénier, Kant, Byron, Schiller, — pour ail thèse soûls into man. Pour in ail the wits from iEsop up to Molière, ail the intellects from Plato up to Newton, ail the encyclopaedists from Aristotle up to Voltaire. By this means you will cure the présent malady and establish forever the health of the human mind. You will cure the middle-class, and found the people. As already îndîcated, after the destruction whîch has delivered the world, you will construct the home for the permanent life of the race. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, 311 What an aîm — to construct the people ! Prîn- cîples combîned wîth science, ail possible quantity of the absolute introduced by degrees into the fact, Utopia treated successively by every mode of reali- zation, — by political economy, by philosophy, by physîcs, by chemistry, by dynamics, by logîc, by art ; union gradually replacîng antagonîsm, and unîty replacîng union ; for religion God, for prîest the father, for prayer virtue, for field the whole earth, for language the word, for law the right, for motîve-power duty, for hygiène labor, for economy unîversal peace, for canvas the very life, for the goal progress, for authority freedom, for people the man. Such îs the simplification. And at the summit the idéal. The idéal ! — stable type of ever-moving progress. To whom belong men of genius, if not to thee, O people? They do belong to thee ; they are thy sons and thy fathers. Thou givest birth to them, and they teach thee. They open in thy chaos vîstas of light. As children, they hâve drunk at thy breasts. They hâve leaped in the universal matrîx of humanity. Each of thy phases, O people, îs an avatar. The deep action of life, — ît îs in thee that ît must be sought. Thou art the great mother. From thee issue the mysterious company of the intelligences : to thee, therefore, let them return. To thee, O people, they are dedîcated by their author, God ! J^ BOOK VI. THE BEAUTIFUL THE SERVANT OF THE TRUE. CHAPTER I. AH, mînds, be useful ! Be of some service. Do not be fastidious when so much dépends upon being efficient and good. Art for art's sake may be very fine, but art for progress is finer still. To dream of castles in Spain is well ; to dream of Utopia is better. Ah ! you must think? Then think of making man better. You must hâve a vision ? Hère is a vision for you, — the idéal. The prophet seeks solitude, but not isolation. He un- ravels and untwists the threads of humanity, tied and rolled in a skein within his soûl ; he does not break them. He goes into the désert to think — of whom? Of the multitudes. It is not to the forests that he speaks, it is to the cities. It is not a reed that he sees shaken with the wind, it is man ; it is not against lions that he cries aloud, it is against tyrants. Woe unto thee, Ahab ! woe unto thee, Hoshea ! woe unto you, kings ! woe unto you, Pharaohs ! is the cry of the great solitaiy. Then he weeps. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 313 Over what? Over that eternal Babylonîsh cap- tîvîty suffered long ago by Israël ; sufTered by Po- land, by Roumania, by Hungary, by Venîce to-day. He grows old, the good and gloomy thînker ; he watches, he lies în waît, he lîstens, he looks, hîs ear înclined to the silence, his eye strainîng înto the nîght, hîs claw half unsheathed toward the wicked. Go, then, and talk of " art for art's sake " to thîs cénobite of the idéal. He walks straight toward his goal, which is this : the best. To this he is consecrated. He is not his own ; he belongs to his apostleshîp. To him îs intrusted the great duty of impelling the human race upon its forward march, Genius is not made for genius, it is made for man. Genius on earth îs God giving himself. Whenever a master- pîece appears, a distribution of God is taking place. The masterpiece is a varîety of the mira- cle. Thence, in ail religions and among ail peoples, cornes faith in divine men. They deceive them- selves who think that we deny the dîvinity of the Christs. At the point now reached by the social question, ail action should be in common. Isolated forces frustrate one another; the idéal and the real are solidary. Art should aîd science. Thèse two wheels of progress should turn together. Génération of new talents, noble group of writers and poets, légion of young men, O living future of my country, your elders love and salute you! Courage ! let us consecrate ourselves. Let us dévote ourselves to the good, to the true, to the just; ît is well for us to do so. 314 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. Some pure lovers of art, moved by a solîcitude which is not without îts dignîty and îts nobîlîty, discard the formula, " Art for Progress," the Beau- tiful Useful, fearîng lest the useful should deform the beautiful. They tremble to see the drudge's hand attached to the muse's arm. Accordîng to them, the idéal may become perverted by too much contact wîth reality. They are solîcitous for the sublime if it descends as far as to humanîty. Ah ! they are in error. The useful, far from cîrcumscribing the sublime, enlarges it The application of the sublime to human affairs produces unexpected masterpieces. The useful, considered in itself and as an élément combining with the sublime, is of several kinds : there is the useful which is tender, and there is the useful which is indignant. Tender, it cheers the un- fortunate and créâtes the social épopée ; indignant, ît flagellâtes the wicked and créâtes the divine satire. Moses passes the rod to Jésus; and after having caused the water to gush from the rock, that same august rod drives the vendors from the Temple. What ! could art decrease by being expanded ? No ; a further service is an added beauty. But people protest: To undertake the cure of social evils, to amend the codes, to impeach law in the court of right, to utter those hideous words, *' penitentiary," " convict-keeper," " galley-slave," ** girl of the town ; " to inspect the police registers, to contract the business of dispensaries, to study the questions of wages and want of work, to taste the black bread of the poor, to seek labor for the working-woman, to confront fashionable idleness WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 3 1 5 wîth ragged sloth, to throw down the partition of ignorance, to open schools, to teach little children how to read ; to attack shame, infamy, error, vice, crime, want of conscience ; to preach the multiplica- tion of spelling-books, to proclaim the equality of the sun, to improve the food of intellects and of hearts, to give méat and drink, todemand solutions for prob- lems and shoes for naked feet, — thèse things are not the business of the azuré. Art is the azuré. Yes, art îs the azuré ; but the azuré from above, whence falls the ray which swells the wheat, yellows the maîze, rounds the apple, gilds the orange, sweetens the grape. Again I say, a further ser- vice is an added beauty. At ail events, where is the diminution? To ripen the beet-root, to water the potato, to increase the yield of lucern, of clover, or of hay ; to be a fellow-workman with the plough- man, the vîne-dresser, and the gardener, — this does not deprive the heavens of one star. Ah ! immen- sity does not despise utility, — and what does it lose by it? Does the vast vital fluid that we call magnetic or electric flash through the cloud-masses with less splendor because it consents to perform the office of pilot to a bark, and to keep constant to the north the little needle întrusted to it, the gigantic guide? Is Auroi'a less splendid, clad less in purple and emerald ; suffers she any dimi- nution of majesty and of radiant grâce, — because, foreseeing an insect's thirst, she carefuUy secrètes in the flower the dewdrop needed by the bee? Yet people insist that to compose social poetry, human poetry, popular poetry; to grumble against the evil and laud the good> to be the spokesman of 3 1 6 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. public wrath, to însult despots, to make knaves despaîr, to emancipate man before he is of âge, to push soûls forward and darkness backward, to know that there are thîeves and tyrants, to clean pénal cells, to flush the sewer of public unclean- ness, — shall Polyhymnia bare her arm to thèse sordid tasks? Fie! Why not? Homer was the geographer and historian of his time, Moses the legislator of his^ Juvenal the judge of his, Dante the theologian of his, Shakespeare the moralist of his. Voltaire the philosopher of his. No région, in spéculation or in fact, is shut to the mind. Hère a horizon, there wings ; freedom for ail to soar. For certain sublime beings, to soar is to serve. In the désert, not a drop of water ; the wretched file of pilgrims drag along, overcome with a horrible thirst ; suddenly, in the horizon, above an undula- tion in the sands, a làmmergeier is seen soaring, and ail the caravan cry out, "There is a spring! " What thinks iEschylus of art for art*s sake? If ever there was a poet, iEschylus is certainly he. Listen to his reply. It is in the * Frogs ' of Ari- stophanes, line 1039. iEschylus speaks: "From the beginning the illustrions poet has served men. Orpheus has taught th*e horror of murder, Musaeus oracles and medicine, Hesiod agriculture, and divine Homer heroism. And I, after Homer, hâve sung Patroclus, and Teucer the lion-hearted, to the end that every citizen may endeavor to imi- tate great men." Just as the whole sea is sait, the whole Bible is poetry. This poetry takes its own time for talking WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 3 1 7 polîtîcs. Open I. Samuel, chapter vîîî. The Jewîsh people demand a kîng. "... And the Lord said unto Samuel, Hearken unto the voîce of the people in ail that they say unto thee : for they hâve not rejected thee, but they hâve rejected me, that I should not reîgn over them. . . . And Samuel told ail the words of the Lord unto the peo- ple that asked of hîm a king. And he said, Thîs will be the manner of the king that shall reign over you : He will take your sons, and appoint them for himself, for his chariots, and to be his horsemen ; and some shall run before his chariots. . . . And he will take your daughters to be confectionaries, and to be cooks, and to be bakers. And he will take your fields, and your vineyards, and your oliveyards, even the best of them, and gîve them to his servants. . . . And he will take your men- servants, and your maid-servants, and your good- liest young men, and your asses, and put them to his work. He will take the tenth of your sheep : and ye shall be his servants. And ye shall cry out în that day because of your king which ye shall hâve chosen you ; and the Lord will not hear you in that day." Samuel, we see, dénies the right divine ; Deuteronomy shakes the altar, — the false altar, let us observe; but is not the next altar always the false altar? "Ye shall demolish the altars of the false gods. Ye shall seek God where he dwells." It is almost Pantheism. Be- cause it takes part in human affairs, because ît is démocratie hère, iconoclastic there, îs this book less magnificent and less suprême? If poetry is not în the Bible, where is it? 3l8 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, You say : The muse îs made to sîng, to love, to belîeve, to pray. Yes, and no. Let us understand each other. To sing whom? The void? To love whom? One's self? To believe what? The dogma? To pray to what? Theidol? No; hère is the truth : to sîng the idéal, to love humanîty, to belîeve in progress, to pray toward the înfinîte. Take care, ye who trace thèse circles about the poet ; ye place him outsîde of humanîty. That the poet should be beyond humanîty în one way, — by hîs wîngs, by hîs immense flîght, by his possible sudden dîsappearance în the fathomless, — is weli, ît must be so ; but on condition of reappearance. He may go, but he must return. Let hîm hâve wîngs for the infinité, provided he has feet for the earth, and that, after having been seen flyîng, he is seen to walk. Having gone beyond humanîty, let hîm become man again. After he has .been seen as an archangel, let hîm be once more a brother. Let the star which is in that eye shed a tear, and let ît be a human tear. Thus, human and super- human, he shall be the poet. But to be altogether beyond man, îs not to be. Show me thy foot, genius, and let us see if, lîke myself, thou hast the dust of earth upon thy heel. If thou hast never walked în the dusty footpath which I tread, thou knowest not me, nor I thee. Départ ! Thou who believest thyself an angel art but a bird. Help from the strong for the weak, help from the great for the small, help from the free for the slaves, help from the thinkers for the ignorant, help from the solitary for the multitudes, — such îs the law, from Isaîah to Voltaire. He who does WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, 319 not foUow this law may be a genîus, but he îs only a genîus of luxury. By not handling the things of the earth, he thînks to purify himself ; but he annuls himself. He is the refined, the délicate, he may be the exquisîte genius : he is not the great genius. Any one, roughly usefui, but useful, has the right to ask, on seeing this good-for-nothing genius, " Who is this idler? " The amphora which refuses to go to the fountain deserves the hisses of the water-pots. Great is he who consecrates himself! Even when overcome, he remains serene, and his misfor- tune is happiness. No, it is not a bad thing for the poet to be brought face to face with duty. Duty has a stern likeness to the idéal. The task of doîng one's duty is worth undertaking. No, the jostling with Cato is not to be avoided. No, no, no ; truth, honesty, the instruction of the masses, human liberty, manly virtue, conscience, are not things to disdain. Indignation and compassion for the mournful slavery of man are but two sides of the same faculty ; those who are capable of wrath are capable of love. To level the tyrant and the slave, — what a magnificent endeavorl Now, the whole of one side of actual society is tyrant, and ail the other side is slave. A grim settlement is impendîng, and it will be accomplished. AU thinkers must work with that end in view. They will gain greatness in that work. To be the ser- vant pf God in the task of progress, and the apostle of God to the people, — such is the law which régulâtes the growth of genius. 320 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. CHAPTER II. There are two poets, — the poet of caprice, and the poet of logîc; and there îs a third poet, a composite of the other two, correctîng and com- pletîng the one by the other, and summing up both în a hîgher entîty, so that the two forms are blended în one. Thîs last îs the first. He has caprice, and he follows the divine breath ; he has logîc, and he follows duty. The first writes the Song of Songs, the second writes Leviticus, the third writes the Psalms and the Prophecies. The first îs Horace, the second îs Lucan, the third is Juvenal; the first îs Pindar, the second is Hesiod, the third îs Homer. No loss of beauty results from goodness. Is the lion less beautiful than the tiger because he has the faculty of compassionate émotion? Is that mane deprived of its majesty because the jaw opens to drop the child into its mother's arms? Does the roaring vanish from that terrible mouth because it has licked Androcles? The unhelpful genius, no matter how graceful, is really ugly. A prodigy without love is a monster. Let us love ! let us love! To love has never hindered from pleasîng. Where hâve you seen one form of the good ex- cluding the other? On the contrary, ail that is good is allied. Let me, however, be understood : it does not follow that to hâve one quality implies WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, 32 1 necessarîly the possession of the other; but ît would be strange that one quality added to an- other should produce diminution. To be useful, îs but to be useful ; to be beautiful, is but to be beautîful ; to be both useful and beautiful, is to be sublime. Such are Saint Paul in the first century, Tacitus and Juvenal in the second, Dante in the thirteenth, Shakespeare in the sixteenth, Milton and Molière in the seventeenth. We hâve just now recalled a saying that has become famous, "Art for art's sake." Let us, once for ail, explain ourselves touching thîs ex- pression. If an assertion very gênerai and very often repeated (in good faith, we believe) can be credited, the shibboleth, "Art for art's sake," must hâve been written by the author of this book. Written? never. You may read, from the first to the last line, ail that we hâve published; you will not find thèse words. It is the contrary that îs written throughout our works, and, we insist, în our entire life. As to the expression in itself, what reality has ît? Hère is the fact, which sev- eral of our contemporaries remember as well as we do. One day, thirty-five years ago, în a dis- cussion between critics and poets on Voltaire's tragédies, the author of this book threw out this interruption : " This tragedy is not a tragedy. It does not contain lîving men ; ît contains glib max- îms. Rather, a hundred times, *Art for art's sake.' " Thîs remark, turned — doubtless invol- untarily — from its true sensé to serve the ends of the discussion, has since assumed, to the great surprise of him who had uttered it, the propor- 322 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, tîons of a formula. It îs thîs phrase, lîmîted to ' Alzire ' and to the ' Orphan of China/ and in- contestable in that restricted application, whîch has been turned înto a perfect déclaration of principles, and an axiom to înscribe on the banner of Art. This point settled, let us go on. Between two verses, — the one by Pindar, deifying a coachman or glorifying the brazen nails of a chariot wheel ; the other by Archilochus, so pow- erful that, after having read it, Jeffreys would leave off hîs career of crime and would hang himself on the gallows prepared by him for honest people, — between two such verses of equal beauty, I prefer that of Archilochus. In times anterior to history, when poetry is fabu- lous and legendary, it has a Promethean grandeur. What forms this grandeur? Utility. Orpheus tames wild animais; Amphion builds cities; the poet, tamer and architect, Linus aiding Hercules, Musaeus assisting Daedalus, poetry a civilizing power, — such are the origins. Tradition agrées with reason : in that, the good sensé of the nations îs not deceived. The people hâve always invented fables in the interest of truth. Magnified by that hazy remoteness, everything is great Now, the beast-taming poet whom you admire in Orpheus, you may recognize again in Juvenal. . We insist on Juvenal. Few poets hâve been more insulted, more contested, more calumniated. Calumny agaînst Juvenal has been drawn at such long date that it still lasts. It passes from one knave of the pen to another. Thèse grand haters of evîl are hated by ail the flatterers of power and WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, 323 success. The mob of servîle sophîsts, of writers who hâve the mark of the coUar about their necks, of buUyîng hîstorîographers, of scholîasts kept and fed, of court and school followers, stand in the way of the punîshers and avengers. They croak around thèse eagles. Scaht and gnidging justice is ren- dered to dispensers of justice. They hînder the masters, and rouse the indignation of the lackeys, — for there îs such a thing as the indignation of baseness. Moreover, the dîmînutîves cannot do less than help each other, and Caesarion must at least hâve Tyrannion as a support. The pédant breaks férules for the satrap. For such jobs there are lettered courtiers and officiai pédagogues. Thèse poor, dear vices, so open-handed, thèse excellent conde- scending crimes, his Highness Rufinus, his Majesty Claudius, the august Madame Messalina who en- tertains so sumptuously and grants pensions out of her prîvy purse, and who abides and perpétuâtes her reîgn under the names of Theodora, Frede- gonde, Agnes, Margaret of Burgundy, Isabel of Bavaria, Catherine de* Medici, Catherine of Russia, Caroline of Naples, etc., etc., — ail thèse great lords the crimes, ail thèse fine ladies the turpitudes, shall they hâve the sorrow of witnessing the triumph of Juvenal? No. War with the scourge in the name of sceptres ! War with the rod in the name of the cliques ! That îs well ! Go on, courtiers, clients, eunuchs, and scribes. Go on, publicans and pharisees. You will not hinder the republic from thanking Juvenal, or the temple from approv- ing Jésus. 324 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. Isaîah, Juvenal, Dante, are virgins. Observe theîr downcast eyes. There is chastity in the wrath of the just against the unjust. The Imprécation can be as holy as the Hosanna ; and indignation, honest indignation, has the very purity of virtue. In point of whiteness, the foam has no reason to envy the snow. CHAPTER III. All history proves the workîng partnershîp of art and progress. Dictus ob hoc lenire tigres. Rhythm is a power, — a power that the Middle Ages recognîze and submit to not less than an- tiquity. The second barbarism, feudal barbarism, also dreads the power of verse. The barons, not over-tîmid, are abashed before the poet, — who is this man? They fear lest " a manly song be sung.*' Behind this unknown man is the spirit of civilization. The old donjons full of carnage open their wild eyes and scan the darkness ; anxiety seizes them. Feudality trembles, the den is disturbed. The dragons and the hydras are ill at ease. Why? Because an invisible god is there. It is curious to find this power of poetry in countries where barbarism is densest, partîcularly în England, in that extrême feudal darkness, " pe- nitus toto divisos orbe Britannos." If we believe the legend, — a form of history as true and as false as any other, — it is due to poetry that Colgrim, WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, 325 besîeged by the Brîtons, is relieved in York by hîs brother Bardulf the Saxon ; that King Awlof péné- trâtes into the camp of Athelstan ; that Werburgh, prince of Northumbria, is delivered by the Welsh, — whence, it is said, that Celtic device of the Prince of Wales, Ich dien; ^ that Alfred, King of England, triumphs over Gitro, King of the Danes, and that Richard the Lion-hearted escapes from the prison of Losenstein. Ranulf, Earl of Chester, attacked in his castle of Rothelan, is saved by the intervention of the minstrels, — the legend is confirmed by the privilèges still enjoyed under Elîzabeth by the minstrels, who were patronized by the Lords of Dalton. The poet had the right of reprimand and menace. In 13 16, at Whitsuntide, Edward II. being at table in the grand hall of Westminster with the peers of England, a female minstrel entered the hall on horseback, rode ail around, saluted Edward IL, predicted in a loud voice to the minion Spencer the gibbet and castration by the hand of the exe- cutioner, and to the King the horn by means of which a red-hot iron should be buried in his intes- tines, placed on the table before the King a letter, and departed, unchallenged and unmolested. At the festivals, the minstrels passed before the priests, and were more honorably treated. At Abingdon, at the festival of the Holy Cross, each of the twelve priests received fourpence, and each of the twelve minstrels two shillings. At the priory of Maxtoke, the custom was to give supper 1 Welsh eich dyn^ "behold your man." See Stomionth's Dic- tionary, s. v. — Tr. 326 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, to the mînstrels în the Painted Chamber lîghted by eîght huge wax candies. As we advance toward the North, the risîng fogs seem to magnify the poet. In Scotland, his pro- portions are colossal. If anything surpasses the legend of the rhapsodîsts, it is the legend of the scalds. At the approach of Edward of England, the bards défend Stirlîng as the three hundred had defended Sparta ; and they hâve their Thermopylae, equal to that of Leonîdas. Ossîan, perfectly cer- tain and real, has had a plagiarîst That îs nothîng ; but thîs plagiarîst has done more than rob hîm, — he has made him insipid. To know Fîngal only through Macpherson is as if one knew Amadîs only through Tressan. They show at Staffa the poet's stone, Clachan an Bairdh^ — so named, accordîng to many antiquaries, long before the visit of Walter Scott to the Hébrides. This Bard's Chair, a great hollow rock furnishing a proper seat for a giant, is at the entrance of the grotto. Around it are the waves and the clouds. Behind the Clachan an Baîrdh is piled the superhumaft geometry of the basaltîc prîsms, the chaos of colonnades and waves, and ail the mystery of that dread édifice. The gallery of Fingal runs next to the poet's chair, and there the sea breaks before entering beneath that terrible ceiling. At nightfall the fishermen of the Mackinnon clan think they see in that chair a leaning figure. " It is the ghost," they say ; and no one would venture, even in fuU daylight, to ascend to that awful seat ; for to the idea of the stone îs linked the idea of the tomb, and none but the shadow-man may sit upon that granité chair. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 327 CHAPTER IV. Thought îs power, AU power îs duty. Should thîs power enter înto repose în our âge? Should duty shut its eyes? and îs the moment come for art to dîsarm? Less than ever. Thanks to 1789, the human caravan has reached a hîgh plateau ; and, the horizon beîng vaster, art has more to do. Thîs îs ail. To every widenîng of the horizon, an enlargement of con- scîence corresponds. We hâve not reached the goal. Concord con- densed înto felicity, civîlîzatîon summed up în harmony, — that îs yet far ofT. In the eîghteenth century that dream was so distant that ît seemed guilty. The Abbé de St. Pierre was expelled from the Academy for havîng dreamed that dream, — an expulsion which appears rather severe at a perîod when pastorals carried the day even with Fontenelle, and when St. Lambert învented the îdyl for the use of the nobilîty. The Abbé de St. Pierre has left behind him a word and a dream ; the word îs his own, — ' Beneficence ; ' hîs dream îs the dream of us ail, — ' Fraternity.' Thîs dream, which made Cardinal de Polignac foam, and Vol- taire smîle, îs now less hidden than ît once was în the mist of the improbable ; ît îs a lîttle nearer : but we hâve not attained ît. The people, those orphans seeking their mother, do not yet hold în theîr hand the hem of the robe of peace. 328 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. There remains about us enough of slavery, of sophistry, of war, and of death, to make it essential that the spirit of civîlization should relinquish none of its resources. The îdea of the right divine is not yet entirely dissipated. The spirit which ani- mated Ferdinand VII. in Spain, Ferdinand II. in Naples, George IV. in England, Nicholas in Russia, is still in the air. A spectral remnant still flits about. From that fatal cloud inspira- tions descend upon wearers of crowns bent in dark méditation. Civilization has not yet done with the granters of constitutions, with the proprietors of nations, and with the legitimate and hereditary madmen who assert themselves kings by the grâce of God, and think that they hâve the right of manumission over the human race. It is becoming important to raise some obstacle, to show bad will to the past, and to bring some check to bear on thèse men, on thèse dogmas, on thèse chimeras which stand in the way. Intelligence, thought, science, austère art, philoso- phy, ought to watch and beware of misunderstand- îngs. False rights contrive very easily to put actual armies in the field. There are murdered Polands at the horizon. "AU my anxiety," said a contemporary poet, recently deceased, "is the smoke of my cigar." My anxiety is also a smoke, — the smoke of the cities which are burning yonder. Let us, therefore, bring the tyrants to grief, if we can. Let us again, in the loudest possible voice, re- peat the lesson of the just and the unjust, of right and usurpation, of sworn truth and perjury, of WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, 329 good and evîl, oî fas et nef as ; let us display ail our old antithèses, as they say. Let us contrast what ought to be with what actually is. Let us dispel ail confusion touching thèse things. Bring light, ye that hâve it ! Let us oppose dogma to dogma, principle to principle, energy to obstinacy, truth to imposture, dream to dream, — the dream of the future to the dream of the past, — liberty to despotism. We shall be able to stretch ourselves at full length and smoke out the cigar of fanciful poetry, and laugh over Boccaccio's 'Decameron,' with the soft blue sky over our heads, on the day when the sovereignty of a king shall be exactly of the same dimensions as the liberty of a man. Until then, little sleep; I am distrustful. Place sentinels everywhere. Do not expect from despots a large share of liberty. Let ail the Po- lands effect theîr own deliverance. Unlock the future with your bwn hand. Do not hope that your chain will forge itself into the key of freedom. Up, children of the fatherland ! O mowers of the steppes, arise! Trust to the good intentions of orthodox czars just enough to take up arms. Hypocrisies and apologies, being traps, are an added danger. We live in a tîme when orators are heard prais- ing the magnanimity of white bears and the tender feelings of panthers. Amnesty, clemency, grandeur of soûl ; an era of felicity opens ; fatherly love îs the order. of the day ; behold ail that is already done ; it must not be thought that the spirît of the time is not understood; august arms are open; rallystill doser round the Emperor; Muscovy is 330 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, kind-hearted. See how happy the serfs are! the streams are to flow with milk, prosperity, liberty for ail; your princes groan, like you, over the past ; they are excellent. Come, fear nothing, lîttle ones! AU very good; but candîdly, we are of those who put no faith in the lachrymal gland of crocodiles. The reigning public monstrosities impose stern obligations on the conscience of the thinker, the philosopher, or the poet. Incorruptibility must resist corruption. It is more than ever requisite to show men the idéal, — that mirror reflecting the face of God. CHAPTER V. In literature and philosophy we encounter now and then a man with tears and laughter at com- mand, — Heraclîtus masked as Democritus ; often a very great man like Voltaire. Such a man is an irony, sometîmes tragic, which keeps its coun- tenance. Thèse men, under the pressure of the influences and préjudices of their time, speak with a double meaning. One of the most profound is Bayle, the man of Rotterdam, the powerful thinker. (Do not Write Beyle,) When Bayle coolly utters thîs max- îm : " It is better to weaken the grâce of a thought than to anger a tyrant," I smile, for I know the WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, 33 1 man ; I thînk of hîm persecuted, almost proscrîbed, and I know well that he has given way to the temp- tation of affirmîng merely to give me the îtch of contradiction. But when it is a poet who speaks, a poet whoUy free, rîch, happy, prosperous, invio- lable, one expects clear, frank, and wholesome instruction; one cannot believe that such a man can be guilty of anything like désertion of con- science ; and it is with a blush that one reads this : " Hère below, in time of peace, let every man sweep before his own door. In war, if conquered, one must make terms with the enemy. . . . Let every enthusiast be put on a cross when he reaches his thirtieth year. When once he comes to know the world, he ceases to be a dupe, and becomes a rogue. . . . What utility, what resuit, what ad- vantage does the holy liberty of the press offer you? You hâve the certain démonstration of it, — a profound contempt for public opinion. . . . There are people who hâve a mania for railing at everything that is great; they are men who hâve attacked the Holy Alliance : and yet nothing has been invented more august and more salutary for humanity." Thèse things, belittling to the man who wrote them, are signed Goethe, When he wrote them, Goethe was sixty years old. Indif- férence to good and evil is heady, liable to intoxi- cate ; and this is what comes of it. The lesson is sad, the sight mournful; for hère the helot is an intelligence. A quotation may be a pillory. We post on the public highway thèse lugubrious sentences; it is our duty. Goethe wrote that Let it be remem- 332 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE bered, and let no one among the poets fall agaîn into the same error.^ To become impassîoned for the good, for the true, for the just; to suffer with the sufferers; to feel upon one's soûl ail the strokes inflicted by tormentors upon human flesh ; to be scourged with Christ and flogged with the negro ; to be strength- ened and to lament ; to scale, a Titan, that frowning summit where Peter and Caesar make their swords fraternize, gladium cum gladio copulemus ; to pile for that escalade the Ossa of the idéal on the Pelion of the real ; to make a vast apportionment of hope ; to avail one's self of the ubiquity of the book in order to be everywhere at the same tîme with a consoling thought ; to push pell-mell men, women, children, whites, blacks, peoples, hangmen, tyrants, victims, impostors, the ignorant, proletaries, serfs, slaves, masters, toward the future (a préci- pice to some, to others a deliverance) ; to go forth, to awaken, to hasten, to march, to run, to think, 1 Never having known the real Goethe, Victor Hugo never could do justice to him ; and possibly the relation would not hâve been improved by better acquaintance. The character and works that we call " Goethe " make up an exceedingly complex whole ; to condemn it is akin to condemning an entire civilization. Burke professed himself unable to draw up an indictment against a whole nation ; and in Goethe's case any one broadly acquainted with the f acts would probably find the task almost equally awkward. Hith- erto, at least, it is observable that the severe judgments hâve not emanated from the most patient and compétent investigators. It would be lamentable indeed should sensible people be misled, by the garbled scraps hère cited, into hasty prejudgment of him whose spirit and work are so much more accurately indicated by this Une of his, — " Wouldst thou give freedom to many, first dare to do serviœ to many." — TiL WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 333 to wîll, — that îs indeed well; that makes ît worth while to be a poet. Take care ! You are losing your temper. Certainly, but I am gaining wrath. And now for thy blast în my pinions, O hurrîcane ! There was, of late years, a moment when împas- sibilîty was recommended to poets as a condition of divinîty. To be indiffèrent was called being Olympian. Where had they seen that? That is an Olympus vçry unlike the real one. Read Homer. The Olympians are passion, and nothing else. Boundless humanity, — such is their divinîty. They fight incessantly. One has a bow, another a lance, another a sword, another a club, another thunderbolts. One of them compels the léopards to draw him. Another — Wisdom she — has eut off the serpent-bristling head of Night, and nailed it to her shield. Such îs the calm of the Olympians. Their wraths cause the thunders to roU from end to end of the Iliad and of the Odyssey. Thèse wraths, when just, are good. The poet who has them is the true Olympian. Juvenal, Dante, Agrippa d'Aubigné, and Milton were subject to thèse wraths, Molière too. From the soûl of Alceste flashes constantly the lightnîng of "vig- orous hatreds." It was the hatred of evil which Jésus meant when he said, " I am come to brîng war." I like Stesichorus, indignant, preventîng the alli- ance of Greece with Phalarîs, and fighting the brazen buU with strokes of the lyre. Louis XIV. found ît good to hâve Racine sleep- ing în his chamber when he, the King, was îll, — thus turning the poet into an assistant to his apothe* 334 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, cary. Wonderful patronage of letters! But he asked nothing more from the men of letters, and the horizon of his alcôve seemed to him sufficient for them. One day Racine, somewhat urged by Madame de Maintenon, conceived the thought of leaving the King's chamber and of visiting the garrets of the people. Thence a memoir on the public distress. Louis XIV. cast at Racine a kill- îng look. Poets fare îU when, being courtiers, they do what royal mistresses ask of them. Racine, at the suggestion of Madame de Maintenon, risks a remonstrance which causes him to be driven from court, and he dies of it ; Voltaire, at the in- stigation of Madame de Pompadour, ventures a madrigal, — an awkward one, it appears, — which causes him to be driven from France, and he does not die of it. Louis XV. on reading the madrigal ("Et gardez tous deux vos conquêtes") had ex- claimed, " What a fool this Voltaire is ! " Some years ago "a well-authorized pen," as they say in officiai and académie cant, wrote this : " The greatest service that poets can render us is to be good for nothing. We ask of them nothing else." Observe the scope and sweep of this ward, — " the poets," — which includes Linus, Musaeus, Orpheus, Homer, Job, Hesiod, Moses, Daniel, Amos, Ezekîel, Isaiah, Jeremiah, iEsop, David, Solomon, iEschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Pin- dar, Archilochus, Tyrtaeus, Stesichorus, Menander, Plato, Asclepîades, Pythagoras, Anacreon, Theoc- ritus, Lucretius, Plautus, Terence, Virgil, Horace, CatuUus, Juvenal, Apuleius, Lucan, Persius, Ti- buUus, Seneca, Petrarch, Ossian, Saadi, Firdûsi, WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 335 Dante, Cervantes, Calderon, Lope de Vega, Chau- cer, Shakespeare, Camôens, Marot, Ronsard, Rég- nier, Agrippa d'Aubigné, Malherbe, Segrais, Racan, Milton, Pierre Corneille, Molière, Racine, Boileau, La Fontaine, Fontenelle, Regnard, Lesage, Swift, Voltaire, Diderot, Beaumarchais, Sedaine, Jean- Jacques Rousseau, André Chénier, Klopstock, Les- sing, Wîeland, Schiller, Goethe, Hofmann, Alfieri, Chateaubriand, Byron, Shelley, Wordsworth, Burns, Walter Scott, Balzac, Musset, Béranger, Pellico, Vigny, Dumas, George Sand, Lamartine, — ail declared by the oracle " good for nothing," and having uselessness for their excellence. That sen- tence — a " success," it appears — has been very often repeated. We repeat it in our turn. When the conceit of an idiot reaches such proportions, it deserves registration. The writer who uttered that aphorism is, so they assure us, one of the high personages of the day. We hâve no objec- tion; dignities shorten no ears. Octavius Augustus, on the morning of the battle of Actium, met an ass called by its driver " Tri- umphus." This Triumphus, e.idowed with the faculty of braying, seemed to him of good omen. Octavius Augustus won the battle; and remem- bering Triumphus, had him cast in bronze and set up in the Capitol. That made a Capitoline ass; but still — an ass. One can understand kings sayîng to the poet, " Be useless ; " but one does not understand the peo- ple sayîng so to him. The poet is for the people. " Pro populo poëta," wrote Agrippa d'Aubigné. "Au things to ail men," exclaîms Saint Paul. 336 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. What is an intelligence? A feeder of soûls. The poet is at the same time a menace and a promise. The distress he arouses in oppressors calms and consoles the oppressed. It is the glory of the poet to place a restless pîllow on the purple bed of the tormentors. It is often thanks to him that the tyrant awakes, saying, "I hâve slept badly." Every slave, every despondency, every sorrow, every misfortune, every distress, every hunger, and every thirst has a claim upon the poet; he has one creditor, — the human race. Certainly it detracts nothing from the poet to be the great servant. AU the mysterious voices sing within him none the less because upon occasion, and impelled by duty, he has uttered the cry of a race, because his bosom must needs swell with the deep human sob. Speaking so loudly does not prevent his speaking low. He is not less the confidant, and sometimes the confessor, of hearts. He is not less intimately connected with those who love, with those who think, with those who sigh, thrusting his head in the darkness between the heads of lovers. André Chénier's love-verses are deprived of none of their tender serenity by their proximity to the wrathful iambic: "Weep thou, O virtue, if I die ! " The poet is the only living being to whom is gîven both the voice of thunder and the whisper, having, like Nature, within himself the rumbling of the cloud and the rustling of the leaf. This is a double function, indivîdual and public ; and it is for this reason that he needs, as it were, two soûls. Ennius said, " I hâve three of them, — an Oscan WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 337 soul, a Greek soûl, and a Latin soûl." It îs true that he referred only to the place of hîs birth, to the place of his éducation, and to the place where he was a citizen ; and moreover Ennius was but a rough cast of a poet, vast, but shapeless. No poet can exist without that activity of soul «vhich is the résultant of conscience. The primai moral laws need to be confirmed ; the new moral laws need to be revealed : thèse two séries do not coïncide without some effort. This effort is in- cumbent on the poet. At every turn he performs the function of the philosopher. He must défend, according to the side attacked, now the liberty of the human mînd, now the liberty of the human heart, — to love being no less holy than to think. There is nothing in ail that of "Art for art's sake." Into the midst of those goers and comers that we call the living, cornes the poet, to tame, like ancient Orpheus, the tiger in man, — his evil in- stincts, — and, like legendary Amphion,to pull down the walls of préjudice and superstition, to mount the new blocks, to relay the foundations and the corner-stones, and to build anew the city of human Society. That such a service, — to co-operate in the work of civilization, — should involve loss of beauty for poetry and of dignity for the poet, is a propo- sition which one cannot enunciate without smiling. Useful art préserves and augments ail its grâces, ail its charms, ail its prestige. In truth ^Eschylus is not degraded by taking part with Prometheus, the man progress crucified by force on Caucasus, and gnawed alive by hâte; Lucretius is no less 22 PART THIRD. CONCLUSION. BOOK I. AFTER DEATH. - SHAKESPEARE. — ENGLAND. . CHAPTER I. IN 1784, Bonaparte, then fifteen years old, arrîved at the military school of Paris from Brîenne, beîng one among four under the conduct of a minim priest. He mounted one hundred and seventy-three steps, carryîng hîs small valise, and reached, in the attic, the barrack chamber he was to occupy. This chamber had two beds, and a small window opening on the great yard of the school. The young predecessors of Bonaparte had bescrawled the whitewashed wall wîth charcoal, and the new-comer could read in this little cell thèse four inscriptions, which we ourselves read there thirty-five years ago : " An epaulet îs very long to win." — De Montgivray. "The finest day in life îs that of a battle." — Vicomte de Tinténiac. " Life is but a prolonged lie." — Le Chevalier Adolphe Delmas. " The end of ail îs sîx feet of earth." — 342 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. Le Comte de la Villette. With the trîfling substitu- tion of the Word ** empire " for " epaulet," thèse four sentences contained the whole destiny of Bonaparte, and formed a kind of " Mené, Tekel, Upharsin," written in advance upon that wall. Desmazis, junior, who accompanied Bonaparte, being his room-mate, and about to occupy one of the two beds, saw hîm take a pencil — Desmazis himself has related the incident — and draw, under the inscriptions that he had just read, a rough sketch of his house at Ajaccio ; then, by the side of that house, — without suspecting that he was thus bringing near the Island of Corsica another mysterious island then hid in the far future, — he wrote the last of the four sentences : " The end of ail is six feet of earth." Bonaparte was right. For the conqueror, for the soldier, for the man of materîal fact, the end of ail is six feet of earth ; for the man of thought, ail begîns there. Death is a powei*. For him who has had no actîvity but that of the mind, the tomb is the élimination of the obstacle. To be dead is to be all-powerful. The man of war is formidable while alive; he stands erect; the earth is silent, siluit; he has extermination in his gesture ; millions of haggard men rush after him, a fierce horde, sometimes a rufïianly one ; it is no longer a human head, it is a conqueror, it is a captain, it is a king of kîngs, it is an emperor, it is a dazzling crown of laurels which passes, throwing out lightning flashes, and showing, in a starry light beneath, a vague profile of Caesar. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 343 Thîs vision is splendid and astounding; but a little gravel in the liver, or an abrasion of the pylorus, — six fect of earth, and ail is over. This solar spectrum vanishes. This tumultuous life falk into a hole; the human race pursues its way, leaving behind this emptiness. If this man-hurricane has made some lucky rupture, — like Alexander in India, Charlemagne in Scandinavia, and Bonaparte în old Europe, — that is ail that remains of him. But let some passer-by who has in him the îdeal ; let a poor wretch like Homer throw out a word in the darkness, and die, — that word lîghts up the gloom, and becomes a star. This defeated man, driven from town to town, is called Dante Alighieri, — take care ! This exile is called iEschylus, this prisoner is called Ezekiel, — bcware! This one-handed man îs winged, — ît is Miguel Cervantes. Do you know whom you see wayfaring there before you? It is a sick man, Tyrtseus; it is a slave, Plautus; it is a laborer, Spinoza; it is a valet, Rousseau. Well, that abasement, that labor, that servitude, that infirm- ity, is power, — the suprême power, mind. On the dunghill like Job, under the stick like Epictetus, under contempt like Molière, mind re- mains mind. It is destined to hâve the last word. The Caliph Almanzor makes the people spit on Averroes at the door of the mosque of Cordova ; the Duke of York himself spits on Milton; a Rohan, almost a prince, " Duc ne daigne, Rohan suis," ^ attempts to cudgel Voltaire to death ; Descartes is driven from France in the name of ^^ " I would not stoop to be a duke •, I am Jlohan." — X^- 344 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. Aristotle ; Tasso pays for a kîss gîven a princess by twenty years în a prison cell ; Louis XV. sends Diderot to Vincennes : thèse are mère incidents ; must there not be some clouds? Those appear- ances that were taken for realities, those princes, those kings, melt away ; there remains only what should remain, — the human mind on the one side, the divine minds on the other ; the true work and the true workers ; society to be perfected and made fruitful, science seeking the true, art creating the beautiful, the thirst of thought, — the torment and the happîness of man; the lower life aspiring to the higher. Real questions are to be dealt with ; progress in intelligence and by intelligence is to be secured. The aid of the poets, the prophets, the philosophers, the inspired thinkers is invoked. It is perceived that philosophy is a nourishment, and poetry a need. Man cannot live by bread alone. Give up the poets, and you give up civilization. There comes an hour when the human race is com- pelled to reckon with Shakespeare the actor, and with Isaiah the beggar. They are the more présent when they are no longer seen. Once dead, thèse beings live. What life did they lead? What kind of men were they? What do we know of them? Some- times but little, as of Shakespeare ; often nothing, as of those of ancient days. Did Job exist? Is Homer one, or several? Méziriac makes iEsop straight, and Planudes makes him a hunchback. Is it true that the prophet Hosea, in order to show his love for his country, even when she was fallen into opprobrium and infamy, espoused a harlot, WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 345 and named hîs children Mournîng, Famine, Shame, Pestilence, and Misery? Is it true that Hesiod must be divîded between Cyme in iEolis, where he was born, and Ascra in Bœotia, where he is said to hâve been brought up? Velleius Paterculus places him one hundred and twenty years after Homer, with whom Quintilian makes him con- temporary. Which of the two is right? What matters it? The poets being dead, their thought reigns. Having been, they are. They do more work among us to-day than when they were alive. Others who hâve departed this life rest from theîr labors: dead men of genîus work. They work upon what? Upon mînds. They make civilization. The end of ail is six feet of earth? No ; there ail begins, germinates, flowers, grows, issues, streams forth. Such maxims are very well for you, O men of the sword ! Lay yourselves down, dîsappear, lie în the grave, rot. So be it. While life lasts, gilding, caparîsons, drums and trumpets, panoplies, banners în the wind, tumults, delude the sensés. The crowd gazes with admi- ration on thèse things. It imagines that it sees something grand. Who wears the casque? Who the cuirass ? Who the sword-belt ? Who is spurred, helmeted, plumed, armed? Hurrah for that one! At death the différence becomes plain. Juvenal takes Hannibal in the hoUow of his hand. It is not Caesar, it is the thinker, who can say when he expires, "Deus fio." So long as he 346 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, remains a man, his flesh interposes between other men and him. The flesh is a cloud upon genius. Death, that immense light, comes and pénétrâtes the man with its aurora. No more flesh, no more matter, no more shadow. The unknown which was within him manifests itself and beams forth. In order that a mind may give ail its light, death is required. When that which was a genius becomes a soûl, the human race begins to be dazzled. A book within which there is something of the phan- tom is irrésistible. He who is still living does not appear disinter- ested. People mistrust him. People dispute hîm because they jostle against him. Both to be alive and to be a genius is too much. This being goes and comes as you do ; it walks the earth ; it has weight; it casts a shadow; it obstructs. There seems a kind of importunity in the présence of too great a man; men find him not sufïiciently like themselves. As we hâve said before, they owe him a grudge. Who is this privileged person? This functionary cannot be dismissed. Persécu- tion makes him greater, décapitation crowns him. Nothing can be done against him, nothing for him, nothing with him. He is responsible, but not to you. He has his instructions. What he exécutes may be discussed, not modified. It âeems as though he had a mission to accomplish from some one who is not a man. Such an exception displeases ; hence more hisses than applause. Once dead, he is out of the way. The useless hiss dies out Living, he was a rival ; dead, he is a benefactor. He becomes,^ in the beautiful ex- WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 347 pression of Lebrun, "the irréparable man," Lebrun says this of Montesquieu ; Boileau says the same thing of Molière. "Avant qu'un peu de terre," etc.^ This handful of earth has equally exalted Voltaire. Voltaire, so great in the eîghteenth cen- tury, is still greater in the nineteenth. The grave is a crucible. The earth thrown on a man cleanses his name, and allows it not to pass forth till puri- fied. Voltaire has lost his false glory and retained the true. To lose the false is gain. Voltaire is neither a lyric poet, nor a comic poet, nor a tragic poet ; he îs the indignant yet tender critic of the Old World ; he is the mild reformer of manners ; he îs the man who softens men. Voltaire, having lost ground as a poet, has risen as an apostle. He has done what is good rather than what is beautiful. The good being included in the beautiful, those who, like Dante and Shakespeare, hâve produced the beautiful, surpass Voltaire ; but below the poet, the place of the philosopher is still very high, and Voltaire is the philosopher. Voltaire is good-sense in a continuai stream. Excepting literature, he is a good judge of everything. In spite of his insulters, Voltaire was almost adored during his lifetime; to-day he is, on thoroughly valid grounds, admired. The eighteenth century saw his mind ; we see his soûl. Frederick II., who liked to banter him, wrote 1 Part of the nineteenth Une of Boileau's seventh epistle, which is dedicated to Racine. The whole sentence may be roughly ren- dered as foUows : — '* Beforé a little earth, obtained by intercession, Had forever hidden Molière from human sight, A thoasand of those beaaties, so highly praised to-day, Wtre by silly people rejected before dut very eyes.*' — Ti. 348 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. to D'Alembert : "Voltaire plays the bufïbon. This century resembles the old courts; it has its fool, and Arouet is he." This fool of the century was its sage. Such, for great minds, are the issues of the tomb. That mysterious entrance otherwhere leaves light behind. Their setting is resplendent. Death makes their authority free and effective. CHAPTER II. Shakespeare îs the chîef glory of England. England has in politics, Cromwell ; in philosophy. Bacon; in science, Newton: three lofty men of genius. But Cromwell is stained with cruelty, and Bacon with meanness; as to Newton, his édifice îs at this moment tottering. Shakespeare is pure, as Cromwell and Bacon are not, and unshaken, as Newton is not Moreover, his genius is loftier. Above Newton are Copernicus and Galileo ; above Bacon are Descartes and Kant; above Cromwell are Danton and Bonaparte; above Shakespeare there is no one. Shakespeare has equals, but no i superior. It is a singular honor for a land to hâve borne such a man. One may say to that land, Aima parens ! The native town of Shakespeare is a chosen city ; an eternal light falls on that cradle ; Stratford-on-Avon has a security that Smyrna, Rhodes, Colophon, Salamis, Chios, Argos, and WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, 349 Athens, the seven towns which dispute the bîrth- place of Homer, do not possess. Shakespeare is a human mind; he îs also an Englîsh mind. He is very English — too Englîsh; he is English so far as to subdue the horror sur- rounding the abominable kings whom he places on the stage, — when they are kings of England ; so far as to depreciate Philip Augustus in com- parison with John Lackland ; so far as to make a scapegoat, Falstaff, expressly in order to load him with the princely misdeeds of the young Henry V. ; so far as in a certain measure to share the hypoc- risies of a history alleged to be national. Lastly, he îs English so far as to attempt to exculpate Henry VHI. ; it is true that the eye of Elizabeth is fixed upon him. But at the same time we însist, — for therein consists his greatness, — this English poet is a humane genius. Art, like religion, has its Ecce Homo. Shakespeare îs one of those to whom may be applied the noble name of Man. England is selfish : selfishness îs an îsland. Thîs Albion, who minds her own business and îs apt to be eyed askance by other nations, is a little lacking în disinterested greatness; of this, Shakespeare gives her some portion. With that purple robe he drapes his countr/s shoulders. By his famé he is universal and cosmopolitan. He overflows îsland and egotism on every side. Deprîve Eng- land of Shakespeare, and consîder how soon thîs natîon's far-shining light would fade. Shakespeare modifies the English countenance and makes ît beautiful. He lessens the resemblance of England to Carthage. 350 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. Strange meanîng of the apparition of men of genius! No great poet îs borne at Sparta, no great poet at Carthage. This condemns thèse two cities. Search, and you shall find this : Sparta is but the cîty of logic ; Carthage is but the city of matter; love is wanting to both. Carthage immo- lâtes her children by the sword, and Sparta sacri- fices her vîrgins by nudity; hère innocence is killed, and there modesty. Carthage knows only her crates and baies ; Sparta blends herself whoUy with the law, — there is her true territory : ît îs for the laws that her men die at Thermopylae. Carth- age is hard, Sparta is cold. They are two republics based on stone. Therefore no books. The eter- nal sower, who îs never deceived, has scattered none of the seed of genius on their thankless soîl. Such wheat is not to be confided to the rock. Heroism, however, is not denied to them ; they will hâve, if necessary, either the martyr or the captain. Leonidas îs possible for Sparta, Han- nibal for Carthage ; but neither Sparta nor Carthage îs capable of Homer. They are devoid of a certain sublime tenderness which makes the poet sprîng from the loins of a people. This latent tenderness, Ûi\s Jlebile nescio quid^ England possesses, — wit- ness Shakespeare; one might also add, wîtness Wilberforce. England, mercantile like Carthage, légal like Sparta, is better than Sparta and Carthage. She îs honored by that august exception, a poet; to hâve given birth to Shakespeare makes England great. Shakespeare's place is among the most sublime WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, 3 5 1 în that sélect company of absolute întellîgences who, ever and anon reînforced by some noble newcomer, form the crown of civîlization, lighting the human race with a wîde radiance. Shake- speare îs légion. Alone, he forms the counter- poise to our grand French seventeenth century, and almost to the eîghteenth. When one arrives in England, the first thîng the eye seeks îs the statue of Shakespeare; ît falls upon the statue of Wellington. Wellington îs a gênerai who, în collaboration with chance, gained a battle. If you insist, you are taken to a place called Westminster, where there are kîngs, — a crowd of kings ; there is also a nook called " The Poets' Corner." There, in the shade of four or five mag- nificent monuments where some royal nobodies shine in marble and bronze, you are shown a statuette upon a little bracket, and beneath this statuette the name, "William Shakespeare." Furthermore, there are statues everywhere, — statues to the heart's content. Statue of Charles, statue of Edward, statue of William, statues of three or four Georges, of whom one was an idiot Statue of the Duke of Richmond at Huntley; statue of Napier at Portsmouth ; statue of Father Mathew at Cork ; statue of Herbert Ingram — I forget where. A man has well drîlled the rifle- men, — a statue to him; a man has commanded a manœuvre of the Horse Guards, — a statue to him. Another has been a supporter of the past, has squandered ail the wealth of England in pay- ing a coalition of kings against 1789, against 352 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. democracy, agaînst lîght, agaînst the upward move- ment of the human race, — quick ! a pedestal for that, a statue to Mr. Pitt Another has knowingly fought against truth, in the hope that it might be vanquished; but finding, one fine mornîng, that truth is hard-lived, that ît is strong, that it might corne to be intrusted with forming a cabinet, has then passed abruptly over to its side, — one more pedestal, a statue to Mr. Peel. Everywhere, in every street, in every square, at every step, gigan- tic notes of admiration in the shape of columns, — a column to the Duke of York, which should take the form of a point of interrogation ; a col- umn to Nelson, with Caraccioli*s ghost pointing the finger at it; a column to Wellington, already mentioned; columns for everybody: it is suffi- cient to hâve trailed a sabre a little. At Guernsey, by the seaside, on a promontory, there is a hîgh column — almost a tower — resembling a light- house. This one is struck by lightning. iEschylus would hâve contented himself with it. To whom is this? To General Doyle. Who is General Doyle? A gênerai. What did this gênerai do? He constructed roads. At his own expense? No, at the expense of the inhabitants. A column to him. None to Shakespeare, none to Milton, nône to Newton; the name of Byron is obscène. Such is England, that illustrions and powerful nation. It avails little that this nation has for pioneer and guide the gênerons British press, which is more than free, which is sovereign, and which through innumerable excellent journals throws WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 353 lîght upon every question, — that îs where Eng- land is ; and let not France laugh too loudly, with her statue of Négrier; nor Belgium, with her statue of Belliard; nor Prussia, with her statue of Blùcher ; nor Austria, with the statue that she probably has of Schwartzenberg ; nor Russia, with the statue that she must hâve of Souwaroff. If it is not Schwartzenberg, it is Windischgrâtz ; if it is not Souwaroff, it is Kutusoff. Be Paskiewitch or Jellachich, statue ; be Auge- reau or Bessières, statue; be an Arthur Welles- ley, they will make you a colossus, and the ladies will dedicate you to yourself, quite naked, with this inscription : " Achilles." A young man, twenty years of âge, performs the heroic action of marry- îng a beautiful young girl ; they prépare for him triumphal arches; they come to see him out of curiosity; the garter is sent to him as on the morrow of a battle; the public squares are bril- liant with fireworks; people who perhaps hâve gray beards put on perukes to come and harangue him almost on their knees; they shoot into the air millions sterling in squibs and rockets, amîd the applause of a multitude in tatters who will hâve no bread to-morrow; starving Lancashire forms a companion-piece to the wedding ; people are in ecstasies, they fire guns, they ring the bells, " Rule Britannia ! " " God save the prince." What ! this young man has the kindness to do this? What a glory for the nation! Universal admiration, — a great people becomes frantic, a great city fialls into a swoon, a balcony looking upon the passage of the young man îs rented for five hundred 23 354 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. guineas, people crowd themselves together, press upon each other, thrust each other beneath the wheels of his carriage, seven women are crushed to death in the enthusiasm, their little chîldren are picked up dead under the trampling feet, a hun- dred persons, partially stifled, are carried to the hospital; the joy is inexpressible. While this is going on in London, the cutting of the Isthmus of Panama is postponed by a war; the cutting of the Isthmus of Suez dépends on some Ismaîl Pasha; a company (limited) undertakes the sale of the water of Jordan at a guinea a bottle ; walls are invented proof against any cannon-ball, after which missiles are invented which will go through any wall; an Armstrong cannon-shot costs fifty pounds ; Byzantium contemplâtes Abdul-Azis, Rome goes to confession; the frogs, encouraged by the stork, call for a héron, — Greece, after Otho, again wants a king; Mexico, after Iturbide, agaîn wants an emperor; China wants two of them, the Middle King, a Tartar, and the Celestiâl Emperor (Tien Wang), a Chînaman. . . . O earth! throne of stupidity. CHAPTER IIL The glory of Shakespeare reached England from abroad. There was almost a definite day and hour when one might hâve been présent at the landing of his famé at Dover. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 355 It requîred three hundred years for England to catch those two words that the whole world shouted in her car, — " William Shakespeare." What is England? She is Elizabeth. No incar- nation is more complète. In admiring Elizabeth, England worships her own image in the glass. Proud and magnanimous, but strangely hypo- critical, great but pedantic, able but haughty, at once daring and prudish, having favorites but no masters, even in her bed her own mistress, all- powerful queen, inaccessible woman, — Elizabeth is a virgin as England is an island. Like England, shfe calls herself Empress of the sea, Basilea maris, A dreadful deep, swept by the wraths that spare not even Essex, and by the tempests that engulf armadas, défends this virgin and this island from ail approach. The océan is the guardian of this modesty. A certain celibacy, in fact, constitutes the genius of England. Alliances there may be, but no marriage. The world must always keep îts distance. To live alone, to go alone, to reign alone, to be alone, — such is Elizabeth, such is England. On the whole, a remarkable queen, and a won- derful nation. Shakespeare, on the contrary, is a sympathetic genius. To him, insularity, far from being a source of strength, is a bond which he would gladly break. A little more, and Shakespeare would be European. He loves and praises France; he calls her "the soldîer of God." Moreover, in that prudish nation he îs the free poet England bas two books, one which she has 356 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, made, the other which has made her, — Shakespeare and the Bible. Thèse two books do not altogether agrée ; the Bible opposes Shakespeare. Certainly, as a literary book, the Bible — that vast Oriental beaker, brimming with poetry even more than Shakespeare — might harmonize with him ; but from a social and religions point of view ît abhors him. Shakespeare thinks, Shakespeare dreams, Shakespeare doubts. There is in him something of that Montaigne whom he loved. The "To be, or not to be/' comes from the "What do I know?" of Montaigne. Moreover, Shakespeare has the grîevous habit of invention. Faith excommunicates imagination. In respect to fables, Faith is a bad neighbor, and licks none but her own cubs. One recoUects Solon's staff raised against Thespis ; one recol- lects Omar's firebrand waved over Alexandria. The situation is always the same. Modem fanati- cîsm has inherited that staff and that firebrand. Thîs is true in Spain, and is not false in England. I hâve heard an Anglican bishop, in discussing the Iliad, sum up ail in this crushing assertion: " It is not true." Now, Shakespeare can be de- scribed, much more truly than Homer, as " a liar." Two or three years ago the journals announced that a French writer had just sold a novel for four hundred thousand francs. This made a noise in England. A conformist paper exclaimed, "How can a falsehood be sold at such a price?" Besides, two words, all-powerful in England, range themselves against Shakespeare and block his way, — " Improper ! " " Shocking ! " . Let ît be WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 357 noted that in a multitude of places the Bible also is "improper," and Holy Writ is "shocking." The Bible, even in French, and through the rough lips of Calvin, does not hesitate to say, "Tu as paillarde, Jérusalem." ^ Thèse crudities form a part of poe- try as well as of anger, and the prophets, those angry poets, do not abstain from them. Coarse words are constantly on their lips. But England, which is continually reading the Bible, prétends not to notice this. Nothing equals the power of volun- tary deafness in fanatics. Would you hâve another example of this deafness? Roman orthodoxy has not to this day admitted the brothers and sisters of Jésus Christ, although authenticated by the four Evangelists. It is in vain that Matthew says: " Behold, his mother and his brethren stood with- out. . . . And his brethren, James, and Joses, and Simon, and Judas. And his sisters, are they not ail with us?" In vain Mark insists: "Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary, the brother of James, and Joses, and of Juda, and Simon? and are not his sisters hère with us?" In vain Luke repeats : " Then came to him his mother and his brethren." In vain John adds : " He, and his mother and his brethren. . . . Neither did his brethren believe in him. . . . But when his brethren were gone up," — Catholicism does not hear. To make up for this deafness, Purîtanîsm turns a sensitive ear toward Shakespeare, — of whom the Rev. John Wheeler says, he is " like ail poets, something of a Pagan." Intolérance and incon- 1 Ezekiel xvi. 28, and J>assim, — Tr. 358 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. sistency are sîsters. Besîdes, in the matter of proscribing and damnîng, logîc îs superfluous. When Shakespeare, by the mouth of Othello, calls Desdemona "whore," there îs gênerai in- dignation, unanimous revolt, universal scandai. Who is this Shakespeare? AU the Biblical sects stop their ears, forgetting that Aaron applies exactly the same epithet to Sephora, wife of Moses. It is true that this occurs in an apoc- ryphal work, 'The Life of Moses;' but the apocryphal works are quite as authentîc as the canonical ones. Hence the dogged coldness of England toward Shakespeare. Her attitude toward him îs stîll that of Elizabeth, — at least we fear so ; we should be happy to be contradicted. We are more ambîtious for the glory of England than England îs herself. This cannot displease her. England has a strange institution, "the poet lauréate," which attests the officiai, and perhaps the national admirations. Under Elizabeth, and du ring Shakespeare's life, England's poet was named Drummond.^ Past, indeed, are the days when ihe playbills read: "Macbeth, Opéra of Shakespeare, altered by Sir William Davenant." But if * Macbeth ' îs played, it is before a small audience. Kean and Macready hâve failed in it. 1 This "strange institution" seems not to hâve existed in Elizabeth's time; and it is diffîcult to understand in what sensé Scotch Drummond of Hawthornden can be called "England's poet " under Elizabeth, s^nce he was but eighteen when Elizabeth died, and published his ôrst volume of poetry ten years later. *- Tr. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 359 At thîs hour they would not play Shakespeare on any English stage without erasing from the text the Word " God " wherever they find it. In the full tide of the nineteenth century, the Lord Chamber- lain îs still an incubus upon Shakespeare. la England, outside the church, the word "God" îs not made use of. In conversation they replace "God" by "Goodness." In the éditions or in the représentations of Shakespeare, " God " is replaced by " Heaven." What matters it that the sensé is perverted, that the verse limps? "Lord! Lord! Lord ! " the last outcry of expiring Desdemona, was suppressed by officiai command in the édition of Blount and Jaggard in 1623. They do not utter it on the stage.^ " Sweet Jésus ! " would be a blasphemy ; a devout Spanish woman on the Eng- lish stage is bound to exclaim " Sweet Jupiter ! *' Do we exaggerate? Would you hâve a proof? Let us open * Measure for Measure.' There is a nun, Isabella. Whom does she invoke? Jupiter. Shakespeare wrote it " Jésus." ^ 1 The last words o£ Desdemona are, — " Commend me to my kinde Lord : oh £arewell." Her " kinde Lord '* is not, as a Frenchman might naturally think, her God, but her husband. — Tr. 2 On the other hand, however, in spite of ail the Lord Cham- berlains, it îs difficult to beat the French censorship. Religions are diverse, but bigotry is one, and is the same in ail its spécimens. What we are about to write îs an extract from the notes added to his translation by the new translator of Shakespeare : — <' ' Jésus I Jésus I ' This exclamation of Shallow was expunged in the édition of 1623, conformably to the statute whîch forbade the uttenmce of the name of the Divinity on the stage. It is worthy of remark that our modem théâtre has had to undergo, under the sdssors of the Bourbon censorship, the same stupid mutilations to which the censorship of th^ 36o WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. The tone of a certain Puritanical criticism toward Shakespeare is, most certainly, improved ; yet the cure is not complète. It is not many years since an English économiste a man of authority, making, in the midst of social questions, a literary excursion, affirmed, în a lofty digression, and without showing the slightest diffi- dence, this : " Shakespeare cannot live because he has treated subjects for the most part foreign or ancient, — ' Hamlet,' ' Othello,' ' Romeo and Juliet,' 'Macbeth,' 'Lear,' 'Julius Caesar,' * Coriolanus,' ' Timon of Athens,' etc. Now, nothing is viable in literature except matters of immédiate observation, and Works relating to subjects of contemporary interest" What say you to this theory? We should not mention it if it had not found ap- provers in England and propagators in France. Besides Shakespeare, it simply excludes from lit- erary "life" Schiller, Corneille, Milton, Virgil, Euripides, Sophocles, iEschylus, and Homer. It is true that it surrounds with a halo of glory Aulus Stuarts condemned the théâtre of Shakespeare. I read what follows in the first page of the manuscript of *■ Hemani/ which I hâve in my hands : — •Received at the Théâtre-Français, Oct. 8, 1829. * The Stage-manager. 'Albertin.* And below, in red ink : * On condition of expungiug the name of "Jésus*' whererer found, and con* forming to the altérations marked at pages 27, 28, 29, 62, 74, and 76. ' The Secretary of State for the Department of the Interior, *La Bourdonnayb.* (Vol. XI. Notes on < Richard II.' and < Henry IV.,' note 71, p. 462.) " We may add that in the scenery representing Saragossa (second act of * Hemani ') it was forbidden to introduce any belfry or any church, — a prohibition which made resemblance rather difficult, Saragossa having had, in the sixteenth century, three hundred and nine churches, and six hundred and seventeen convents. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 361 Gellius and Restif de la Bretonne. O crîtîc, thîs Shakespeare is not viable, — he is only îmmortal ! About the same tîme another — English also, but of the Scotch school, a Puritan of that dis- contented variety of whîch Knox is the head — declared poetry to be childishness ; rejected beauty of style as an obstacle interposed between the thought and the reader ; saw in Hamlet's soliloquy only " a cold lyricism/' and in Othello's adieu to camps and banners only " a déclamation ; " likened the metaphors of poets to colored prints in books, fit only to amuse babies ; and showed a particular contempt for Shakespeare, as " bedaubed from one end to the other with those bright pîctures." Not longer ago than last January, a witty London paper was asking with indignant irony who is the more celebrated in England, Shakespeare, or " Mr. Calcraft, the hangman." " There are localities in this enlightened country where, if you utter the name of Shakespeare, they will answer you: 'I don't know what this Shakespeare may be, about whom you make ail this fuss, but I will back Hammer Lane of Birmingham to fight him for five pounds.' But no mistake is made about Calcraft."! 1 • Daily Telegraph,' Jan. 13, 1864. 362 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. CHAPTER IV. At ail events, Shakespeare has not the monu- ment that England owes to him. France, let us admit, is not, in like cases, much prompter. Another glory, very différent from Shakespeare, but not less grand, Joan of Arc, waits also, and has waited long, for a national monument — a monument worthy of her. This land, which was once Gaul, and where the Velledas reigned, has, in a Catholic and historic sensé, as patronesses two august figures, Mary and Joan. The one, holy, is the Virgin; the other, heroic, is the Maid. Louis XIII. gave France to the one; the other gave back France to France. The monument of the second should not be less lofty than the monument of the first. Joan of Arc must hâve a trophy as grand as Notre Dame. When shall she hâve it? England is insolvent toward Shakespeare, but France is bankrupt toward Joan of Arc. Thèse ingratitudes need to be sternly denounced. Doubtless the governing aristocracies, which blind the eyes of the masses, are, in the first instance, guilty. But on the whole, conscience exists for a people as for an individual ; ignorance is only an extenuating circumstance ; and when thèse déniais of justice last for centuries, they remain the fault of governments, while becoming the fault of nations. Let us know, when necessary, how to tell nations WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, 363 of their shortcomings. France and England, you are both wrong ! To flatter a people would be worse than to flat- ter a king. The one is base, the other would be dastardly. Let us go farther, and, since the thought présents itself, make a useful generalization from it, even should it take us for a moment from our subject. No, the people are not right in ascribing the blâme indefinitely to the governments. The acceptance of oppression by the oppressed ends in complicity ; cowardice is consent whenever the duration of a bad thing, which wèighs upon a people, and which that people cpuld prevent if it would, goes beyond the bounds of an honest man*s patience ; there îs an appréciable solidarity and a partnership in shame between the government guilty of the evil and the people submitting to it It is vénérable to suffer ; to submit is contemptible. — Let us pass on. It is a coïncidence worthy of note that Voltaire, the denier of Shakespeare, is also the reviler of Joan of Arc. What are we to think of Voltaire? Voltaire (we say it with mingled joy and grief) is the French mind, — the French mind up to the Révolution, solely. Since the Révolution, the French mind has grown with the growth of France, and tends to become the European mind. It îs less local and more fraternal, less Gallic and more human. It represents more and more Paris, the urban heart of the world. As for Voltaire, he remains what he is, — the man of the future ; but also the man of the past. He is one of those 364 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. glories which make the thinker say yes and no ; he has agaînst him two sarcasms, — Joan of Arc, and Shakespeare. He îs punished through what he sneered at. CHAPTER V. Wherefore, îndeed, a monument to Shake- speare? The statue he has made for hîmself, with ail England for a pedestal, is better. Shakespeare has no need of a pyramid ; he has his work. What do you suppose marble could do for him? What can bronze do, where there is glory? Mala- chite and alabaster are of no avail ; jasper, serpen- tine, basait, red porphyry like that at the Invalides, granité, marble of Paros and Carrara, are a waste of pains: genius is genius without them. What though every variety of stone had its place there, would that add a cubit to this man's stature? What arch shall be more indestructible than this, — * The Winter*s Taie,' * The Tempest,' ' The Merry Wives of Windsor,' * The Two Gentlemen of Verona,' ' Julius Caesar,' * Coriolanus ' ? What monument sublimer than * Lear,' sterner than ' The Merchant of Venice,' more dazzling than ' Romeo and Juliet,' more amazîng than * Richard 111/ ? What moon could shed about the pile a light more mystic than that of *A Midsummer-Night's Dream'? What capital, were it even London, could rumble around it as tumultuously as Macbeth's perturbed soûl? What framework of cedar or of oak will last as WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, 365 long as ' Othello ' ? What bronze can equal the bronze of ' Hamlet ' ? No construction of lime, of rock, of iron, and of cernent, îs worth the deep breath of genius, which is the respiration of God through man. A head containing an idea, such is the summit; no heaps of brick and stone can rival it. What édifice equals a thought? Babel is less lofty than Isaiah ; Cheops is smaller than Homer ; the Colosseum is inferior to Juvenal ; the Giralda of Seville is dwarfish by the side of Cervantes; St. Peter's of Rome does not reach to the ankle of Dante. What architect has skill to build a tower as high as the name of Shakespeare ? Add anything, if you can, to a mind ! Imagine a monument. Suppose it splendid, suppose it sublime. A triumphal arch, an obelisk, a circus with a pedestal in the centre, a cathedral. No people is more illustrious, more noble, more splendid, more high-minded, than the English peo- ple. Wed thèse two ideas, England and Shake- speare, an4 let their issue be a monument. Such a nation celebrating such a man, — the spectacle would be superb. Imagine the monument, imagine the inauguration. The Peers are there, the Gom- mons follow, the bishops officiate, the princes join the procession, the Queen is présent. The virtuous woman, in whom the English people, royalist as we know, see and révère their living personification, this worthy mother, this noble widow, comes, with the deep respect which is befitting, to incline ma- terial majesty before idéal majesty, — the Queen of England salutes Shakespeare; the homage of Victoria repairs the disdain of Elizabeth. As for 366 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Elizabeth, she is probably there also, sculptured somewhere on the surbase, with Henry VIII. her father, and James I. her successor, — pigmies be- neath the poet. Cannons boom, the curtain drops, the unveiled statue seems to say : " At length ! " It has grown in the darkness for three hundred years, — three centuries, the youth of a colossus ; how vast it is ! To compose it, the bronze statues of York, of Cumberland, of Pitt, and of Peel, hâve been utilized; the public squares hâve been re- lieved of a heap of unjustifiable castings ; ail sorts of Henries and Edwards hâve been blended in that lofty figure; for it the various Williams and the numerous Georges hâve been melted down; the Hyde Park Achilles forms its great toe : it is noble, — behold Shakespeare almost as great as a Pharaoh or a Sesostris! Bells, drums^ trumpets, applause, hurrahs. Whatthen? To England this is honorable; to Shakespeare indiffèrent. What is the salutation of royalty, of aristocracy, of the army, and even of the English populace, — like almost ail other nations, still ignorant, — what is the acclamation of ail thèse variously enlightened groups, to one who has the eternal and well-con- sidered applause of ail centuries and of ail men ? What oration of the Bishop of London or of the Archbishop of Canterbury is worth the cry of a woman before Desdemona, of a mother before Arthur, of a soûl before Hamlet? When, therefore, a universal voice demands of England a monument to Shakespeare, it is not for WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 367 the sake of Shakespeare, it is for the sake of England. There are cases in which the repayaient of a debt is of greater import to the debtor than to the creditor. A monument is an example. The lofty head of a great man is a light. Crowds, like the waves, require beacons above them. It is good that the passer-by should know that there are great men. People may not hâve time to read : they are forced to see. One passes that way, and stumbles against the pedestal; one is almost obliged to raise the head and to glance a little at the inscription. Men escape a book ; they cannot escape the statue. One day on the bridge of Rouen, before the beautiful statue carved by David d'Angers, a peasant mounted on a donkey said to me, "Do you know Pierre Corneille?" "Yes," I replied. "So do I," he rejoined. "And do you know •The Cid'?" I resumed. "No," said he. To him the statue was Corneille. The people need such an introduction to theîr great men. The monument incites them to know more of the man. They désire to learn to read, in order to know what this bronze means. A statue is a nudge to ignorance. The érection of such monuments is therefore not merely a matter of national justice, but of populaf utility. In the end, England will certainly yield to the temptation of performing an act at once useful and just. She is the debtor of Shakespeare. To leave such a debt in abeyance is an attitude hardly 368 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, compatible wîth national prîde. It îs a point of morality that nations should pay their debts of gratitude. Enthusiasm is probity. When a man is a glory upon his nation's brow, the nation that fails to recognize the fact excites the amazemcnt of the race. CHAPTER VI. As ît was easy to foresee, England will buîld a monument to her poet. At the very moment when we finished writing the pages you hâve just read, announcement was made in London of the formation of a committee for the solemn célébration of the three-hundredth anniversary of the birth of Shakespeare. This committee will dedicate to Shakespeare, on the 23d of April, 1864, a monument and a festival, which will surpass, we doubt not, the incomplète programme we hâve just sketched out. They will spare nothing. The act of admiration will be a striking one. One may expect everything, in point of magnificence, from the nation which has created the prodigious palace at Sydenham, that Versailles of a people. The initiative taken by the committee will certainly receive support from the powers that be. We discard, for our part, and the committee will discard, we think, ail idea of a testimonial by subscription. A subscription, unless of one penny, — that is to say, open to ail the people, — is necessarily fractional. What is WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, 3^ due to Shakespeare îs a national testimonial, — a holiday, a public festival, a popular monument, voted by the Chambers and entered in the Budget. England would do it for her king. Now, what is the King of England beside the Man of England ? AU confidence is due to the Shakespeare Jubilee Committee, — a committee composed of persons highly distinguished in the Press, the peerage, literature, the théâtre, and the Church. Eminent men from ail countries, representing the intelli- gence of France, of Germany, of Belgium, of Spaîn, of Italy, complète this committee, which is from ail points of view excellent and compétent. Another committee, formed at Stratford-on-Avon, seconds the London committee. We congratulate England. Nations are hard of hearing, but so long of life that their deafness is in no way irréparable. They hâve time to change their minds. The English are at last awakening to their glory. England begins to spell that name, Shakespeare, upon which the World has laid her finger. In April, 1664, a hundred years after Shake- speare*s birth, England was engaged in applauding Charles II., — who had sold Dunkirk to France for two hundred and fifty thousand pounds sterling, — and in looking at something, that was a skeleton and had been Cromwell, whitening in the northeast wind and the rain on the gallows at Tyburn. In April, 1764, two hundred years after Shakespeare's birth, England was contemplating the aurora of George III., — a king destined to imbecility, who, at that epoch, in secret councils, and in somewhat unconstitutional asides with the Tory chiefs and 370 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. the German Landgraves, was sketching out that policy of résistance to progress which was to strive, first against liberty in America, then against democracy in France, and which, under the single ministry of the first Pitt, had in 1778 raised the debt of England to the sum of eighty millions sterling. In April, 1864, three hundred years after Shakespeare's bîrth, England raîses a statue to Shakespeare. It is late, — but it is well. BOOK II. THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. CHAPTER I. THE nîneteenth century holds tenure of itself only ; ît receives its impulse from no ancestor ; ît îs the offspring of an îdea. Doubtless Isaiah, Homer, Aristotle, Dante, Shakespeare, hâve been or could be great starting-points for important philosophîcal or poetical growths; but the nine- teenth century has for its august mother the French Révolution. This redoubtable blood flows în its veîns. It honors men of genius, and if need be saintes them when despised, proclaims them when ignored, avenges them when persecuted, re- enthrones them when dethroned : it vénérâtes them, but it does not proceed from them. The nîneteenth century has for family itself, and itself alone. It is the characteristic of its revolutionary nature to dispense with ancestors. Itself a genius, it fraternizes with men of genius. As for its source, it is where theirs is, — beyond man. The mysterious gestations of progress suc- ceed each other according to a providential law. 372 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. The nineteenth century is a birth of civilization. It has a continent to bring into the world. France bas borne this century, and this century bears Europe. When civilization was coexistent with Greece, it was at first circumscribed by the narrow limits of the Morea, or Mulberry Leaf ; then, widening by degrees, it spread over the Roman group of na- tions. To-day it distinguishes the French group ; that is to say, ail Europe, with beginnings în America, in Africa, and in Asia. The greatest of thèse beginnings is a democracy, the United States, whose first tender growth was fostered by France in the last century. France, sublime essayist in progress, founded a republic in America before making one in Europe. Et vidit quod esset bonum. After having lent to Washington an auxiliary, Lafayette, France, returning home, gave to Voltaire, dismayed within his tomb, that formidable successor, Danton. When the Past, that grisly monster, being brought to bay, was hurling ail its thunderbolts, exhaling ail its mias- mas, belching black vapors, protruding horrible talons, Progress, forced to use the same weapons, suddenly put forth a hundred arms, a hundred heads, a hundred fiery tongues, a hundred bel- lowings. The good took the form of the hydra. And this is what is called the Révolution. Nothing can be more augu^t. The Révolution ended one century and began another. An agitation in the world of mind preparatory to an upheaval in the world of fact: such is the WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, 373 eîghteenth century. The political révolution, once accomplished, seeks its expression, and the literary and social révolution takes place : such is the nine- teenth century. It has been said with truth, al- though with hostile intent, that romanticism and socîalism are the same fact. Hatred, wîshing to injure, often affirms, and, so far as in it lies, consolidâtes. A parenthesis. This word "romanticism" has, like ail war-cries, the advantage of sharply epito- mizing a group of ideas ; it is brief, which pleases in the contest: but it has, to our mind, through its militant signification, the înconvenience of ap- pearing to limit to a warlike action the movement that it represents. Now this movement is intelli- gence, an act of civilîzation, an act of soûl; and this is why the writer of thèse lines has never used the words " romanticism " and " romantic." They will be found in none of the pages of criticism that he has had occasion to write. If to-day he départs from his usual prudence in polemics, it is for the sake of greater rapidity, and with every réservation. The same observation may be made on the subject of the word " socialism," which admits of so many différent interprétations. The triple movement — literary, philosophical, and social — of the nineteenth century, which is one single movement, is nothing but the current of the révolution in ideas. This current, after havîng swept away so many facts, flows on, broad and deep, through the minds of men. The term "literary '93," so often repeated in 1830 against the contemporaneous literature, was 3/6 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. from '93. '89 and '93, — from that source issue the men of the nîneteenth century. This is their father and theîr mother. Seek for them no other Hneage, no other inspiration, no other breath of life, no other origin. They are the democrats of thought, successors to the democrats of action. They are liberators. Freedom was the nurse that bent over their cradles ; that ample breast suckled them ail ; they ail hâve her milk in their bodies, her marrow in their bones, her granité in their will, her rébellion in their reason, her fire in theîr intelligence. Even those among them (and there are some) who were by birth aristocrats, who came into the world strangers in old-time familles, who received that fatal early training whose stupid endeavor it is to counteract progress, and who began theîr message to the century by some unmeaning stam- mering of royalîsm, — even thèse (they will not contradict me) felt within them, even from their infancy, the sublime monster. They felt the in- ward ferment of the vast reality. In the deeps of conscîousness they felt an uprising of mysterious thoughts ; theîr soûls were shaken by the profound perturbation of false certitudes ; little by little they perceived the sombre surface of their monarchism, Catholicism, and aristocracy, trembling, quaking, gaping open. One day the swelling of truth within them abruptly culminated, and suddenly the crust was rent, the éruption took place, and behold them opened, shivered by a light which fell not upon them from without, but — nobler miracle ! — issued from thèse astonished men, and illumî- WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 377 nated them while it set them aflame. AU unawares, they had become volcanic craters. They hâve been reproached with this phénom- énal, as with treason. In fact, they passed over from rîght divine to human rights. They turned the back upon false history, false tradition, false dogmas, false philosophy, false daylîght, false truth. That dawn-summoned bîrd, the free-soaring spirit, îs offensive to minds saturated with ignorance and to embryons preserved in alcohol. He who sees, offends the blind ; he who hears, enrages the deaf ; he who walks, însults the cripple in his wooden bowl. In the eyes of dwarfs, abortions, Aztecs, myrmidons, and pigmies forever stunted with the rickets, growth is apostasy. The writers and poets of the nineteenth century hâve the admirable good fortune of proceeding from a genesis, of arriving after an end of the world, of accompanying a reappearance of light, of being the organs of a new beginning. This imposes on them duties unknown to their prede- cessors, — the duties of intentional reformers and direct civilizers. They continue nothing; they form everything anew. The new time brings new duties. The function of thinkers in our days is complex: it no longer sufSces to think, — one must love; it no longer suffices to think and to love, — one must act. To think, to love, and to act, no longer suffice, — one must suffer. Lay down the pen, and go where you hear the grape- shot. Hère is a barricade ; take your place there. Hère is exile; accept it. Hère is the scaflfold, — be it so. Let the Montesquieu be able, in case of 3/8 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, need, to act the part of John Brown. The Lucre- tius of this travailing century should contain a Cato. iEschylus, who wrote ' The Oresteia/ had a brother, Cynegirus, who grappled the eneiiy's ships ; that was sufficient for Greece at the time of Salamis, but it no longer suffices for France after the Révolution. That iEschylus and Cynegirus are brothers, is but little ; they must needs be the same man. Such are the présent requirements of progress. Those who dévote themselves to great and urgent causes can never be too great To set ideas in motion, to heap up évidence, to scafFold up principles, — such is the formidable endeavor. To heap Pelion on Ossa is the labor of infants beside that work of giants, the establishing of right upon truth. Aflerward to scale that height, and to dethrone usurpations in the midst of thunders, — such is the task. The future presses. To-morrow cannot wait. Humanity has not a minute to lose. Quick! quick! let us hasten. The wretched hâve their feet on red-hot iron; they hunger, they thirst, they sufFer. Alas ! terrible emaciation of the poor human body. Parasitism laughs, the ivy grows green and thrives, the mistletoe flourishes, the solitary slug is happy. How frightful is the pros- perity of the tapeworm ! To destroy that which devours, in that is safety. Within your life death itself lives and thrives robustly. There is too much poverty, too much privation, too much im- modesty, too much nakedness, too many houses of shame, too many convict prisons, too many tat- ters, too many défalcations, too many crimes, too WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 379 much darkness; not enough schools; too many Httle innocents growing up for evil! The pallet of the poor gîrl îs suddenly covered with sîlk and lace, — and in that îs the worst misery; by the side of misfortune there is vice, the one urging on the other. Such a society requires prompt suc- cor. Let us seek out the best. Go, ail of you, in this search! Where are the promised lands? Civilizatîon must march forward ; let us test théo- ries, Systems, améliorations, inventions, reforms, until the shoe for that foot shall be found. The experiment costs nothing, or costs but little. To try îs not to adopt. But before ail, above ail, let us be lavish of the light. Ail sanitary purifica- tion begins by opening the Windows wide. Let us open wide ail intellects; let us supply soûls with air. Quick, quick, O thînkers ! Let the human race breathe. Shed abroad hope, sow the idéal, do good. One step after another, horizon after hori- zon, conquest after conquest; because you hâve given what you promised, do not hold yourself quit of obligation. To perform is to promise. To-day's dawn pledges the sun for to-morrow. Let nothing be lost. Let not one force be îso- lated. Every one to work ! the urgency is suprême. No more îdle art. Poetry the worker of civili- zatîon, — what could be more admirable? The dreamer should be a pioneer ; the strophe should mean something. The beautiful should be at the service of honesty. I am the valet of my con- science; it rings for me: I come. "Go." I go. What do you requîre of me, O Truth ! sole mon- 380 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. arch of thîs world? Let each one hâve withîn him an eagerness forwell-doing. A book îs some- times looked forward to for succor. An îdea îs a balm; a word may be a dressîng for wounds; poetry îs a physîcîan. Let no one delay. While you tarry, sufferîng man grows weaker. Let men throw off thîs dreamy lazîness. Leave hashish to the Turks. Let men labor for the welfare of ail ; let them rush forward, and put themselves out of breath. Do not be sparing of your strides. Let nothîng remain useless. No înertîa. What do you call dead nature? Everything lîves. The duty of ail is to live. To walk, to run, to fly, to soar, — such is the unîversal law. What are you waiting for? Who stops you? Ah! there are times when one might wîsh to hear the stones cry out against the sluggishness of man. Sometimes one wanders away into the woods. To whom does it not sometimes happen to be dejected? — one sees so many sad things. The goal does not appear, the results are long in com- ing, a génération is behindhand, the work of the âge languishes. What! so many sufferings yet? One would say there had been retrogression. There is everywhere încrease of superstition, of cowardice, of deafness, of blindness, of imbecilîty. Brutishness is weighted down by pénal laws. The wretched problem has been set, — to augment comfort by neglecting right ; to sacrifice the supe- rior side of man to the inferior side ; to yield up principle to appetite. Caesar takes charge of the belly, I make over to him the brains : it is the old sale of the birthright for the mess of lentils, A >N WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 381 lîttle more, and thîs fatal counter-movement would set civilizatîon upon the wrong road. The swine fattenîng for the knife would no longer be the kîng, but the people. . . . Alas! this ugly expédient does not even succeed; there îs no diminution of wretchedness. For the last ten years — for the last twenty years — the low-water mark of prostitu- tion, of mendicity, of crime, has been constantly visible; evil has not fallen a single degree. Of true éducation, of free éducation, there îs none. Nevertheless, the child needs to be told that he is a man, and the father that he is a citizen. Where îs the promise? Where is the hope? Oh! poor, wretched humanîty, one is tempted to shout for help în the forest, one is tempted to claim sup- port and materîal assistance from vast and sombre Nature. Can this mysterious union of forces be indiffèrent to progress? We supplicate, we call, we lift our hands toward the shadow. We listen, wonderîng if the rustiings will become voîces. The duty of the sprîngs and streams should be to babble forth the word " Forward ! " and one could wish to hear the nîghtîngales sing new Marseil- laises. But, aller ail, thèse seasons of halting hâve în them nothing but what îs normal. Discourage- ment would be weakness. There are halts, rests, breathing-times in the march of nations, as there are wînters în the progress of the seasons. The gîgantic step, '89, îs none the less a fact. To despaîr would be absurd, but to stimulate is necessary. To stimulate^ to press, to chîde, to awaken, to 382 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. suggest, to inspire, — thèse are the functions which, fuliilled everywhere by writers, impress on the lîterature of this century so marked a stamp of power and originality. To remain faîthful to ail the laws of art, while combining them with the law of progress, — such is the problem triumphantly solved by so many noble and lofty minds. Thence the word " Deliverance,** shining aloft in the lîght as if it were written on the very brow of the Idéal. The Révolution is France sublîmated. There came a day when France entered the fur- nace, — the furnace breeds wings upon such warrior martyrs, — and from thèse fiâmes the giantess came forth an archangel. Throughout the earth to-day the name of France is révolution ; and henceforth this word "révolution" wîU be the name of civilizâtion, until it can be replaced by the word " harmony/' Seek nowhere else, I repeat, the starting-point and the birthplace of the literature of the nineteenth century. Ay! every one of us, great and small, powerful and despised, illustrions and obscure, in ail our Works, good or bad, whatever they may be, poems, dramas, romances, history, philosophy, at the tribune of assemblies as before the crowds of the théâtre or in solitary méditation; ay! everywhere and always; ay! to combat violence and imposture; ay! to restore those who are stoned and run down; ay! to draw logical con- clusions and. to march straight onward ; ay ! to console, to succor, to relieve, to encourage, to teach; ayl to dress wounds, in hope of curing them; ayl to transform charity into fratemity. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 383 alms înto helpfulness, sloth înto îndustry, îdleness înto usefulness, to make centralîzed power gîve place to the family, to convert iniquity to justice, the bourgeois into the citizen, the populace into the people, the rabble înto the nation, nations înto humanity, war înto love, préjudice into free înquiry, frontiers înto welded joints, barriers into thoroughfares, ruts into rails, vestry-rooms înto temples, the instinct of evil into the désire of good, lîfe înto right, kings into men; ay! to deprive religions of hell, and societies of the prison-den ; ay ! to be brothers to the wretched, the serf, the fellah, the poor laborer, the disinherited, the vîctîm, the betrayed, the conquered, the sold, the shackled, the sacrificed, the harlot, the con- vîct, the ignorant,, the savage, the slave, the negro, the condemned, the damned, — ay ! for ail thèse things we are thy sons, O Révolution ! Ay! men of genîus; ay! poets, philosophers, historians; ay! giants of that great art of the early âges which is ail the light of the past, — O men eternal, the minds of this day salute you, but do not follow you. Concerning you they hold this law: Admire everything, imitate nothing. Their functîon is no longer yours. They hâve to do with the manhood of the human race. The hour of man's majority has struck. We assist, un- der the full light of the idéal, at the majestic union of the Beautiful with the Useful. No présent or possible genius can surpass you, ye ancient men of genius ; to equal you is ail the ambition allowed : but to equal you we must provide for the needs of our time, as ye supplied the wants of yours ! Z' 384 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. Writers who are sons of the Révolution hâve a holy task. Theîr epic must sob, O Homer ! their history must protest, O Herodotus! their satire must dethrone, O Juvenal ! their " thou shalt be king " must be said to the people, O Shakespeare ! their Prometheus must smite down Jupiter, O iEschylus ! their dunghill must be fruitful, O Job ! their hell must be quenched, O Dante ! thy Baby- lon crumbles, O Isaiah ! theirs must be radiant with light ! They do what you hâve done, — they contemplate création directly, they observe human- îty directly; they accept as lodestar no refracted ray, not even yours. Like you, they hâve for theîr sole starting-point, outside themselves the Unî- versal Being, within themselves the soûl ; as the source of their work they hâve the one source whence flows Nature and whence flows Art, the Infinité. As the writer of thèse Unes declared nearly forty years ago : ^ " The poets and the writers of the nineteenth century hâve neither masters nor models." No, in ail that vast and sublime art of ail nations, among ail those grand créations of ail epochs, they find neither masters nor models, — not even thee, O iEschylus ! not even thee, O Dante ! not even thee, O Shakespeare ! And why hâve they neither masters nor models? It is because they hâve one model, Man, and be- cause they hâve one master, God. 1 Préface to * Cromwell.* BOOK III. TRUE HISTORY. — EVERY ONE PUT IN HIS PLACE. CHAPTER I. BEHOLD the rîsing of the new constellation ! It is now certain that what has hitherto been the light of the human race begins to pale îts inef- fectuai fire, and that the ancîent beacons are flick- ering out. From the begînnîng of human tradition men of force alone hâve glittered in the empyrean of his- tory; theirs was the sole supremacy. Under the various names of kîng, emperor, chief, captain, prince, — epitomized in the word ** hero," — this apocalyptic group shone resplendent. Terror raised acclamations to salute them, dripping with the blood of victories. They were foUowed by a train of tumultuous fiâmes ; their dishevelled light gleamed portentous upon the chiidren of men. If they lit the sky, it was with fiâmes. They seemed to wish to extend their sway over the Infinité. Amid their glory was heard the crash of ruin. That red glare — was it the purple? was it blood? was it shame? Their light suggested the face of 25 386 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. Caîn. They hated one another. They exchanged flashîng bolts. At times thèse vast stars crashed together amîd voUeys of lightning. Their look was furious. Their radiance stretched înto sword- blades. AU this hung terrible above us. Such îs the tragîc glare that fills the past ; to- day ît is rapidly waning. There is décline in war, décline in despotism, décline in theocracy, décline in slavery, décline in the scaffold. The sword-blade grows shorter, the tiara is fading away, the crown is vulgarized, war is coming to seem but madness, the plume îs abased, usurpation is circumscribed, shackles are growing lighter, the rack is out of joint. The antique violence of the few against ail, called right divine, is nearing îts end. Legitimate sovereignty by the grâce of God, the Pharamond monarchy, nations branded on the shoulder with the fleur-de- lys, the possession of nations by the fact of birth, rights over the living acquired through a long line of dead ancestors, — thèse things still maintain the struggle for existence hère and there, as at Naples, in Prussia, etc. ; but it is a struggle, not a battle, — it îs death straining after life. A stammering, which to-morrow will be speech, and the day after to- morrow a gospel, proceeds from the bruised lips of the serf, of the vassal, of the laboring-man, of the pariah. The gag is breaking between the teeth of the human race. The patient human race has had enough of the path of sorrow, and refuses to go farther. Already certain kinds of despots are no longer possible. The Pharaoh is a mummy, the Sultan is WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 387 a phantom, the Caesar îs a counterfeit. Thîs sty- lite of the Trajan columns îs anchylosed upon its pedestal ; its head is covered with the excrément of the free eagles ; it is nonentity rather than glory ; this laurel garland is bound on with grave-clothes. The period of the men of violence is past. They hâve been glorious, certainly, but with a glory that melts away. That species of great men is soluble în progress. Civilization rapidly oxidizes thèse bronzes. The French Révolution has already brought the universal conscience to such a degree of maturity that the hero can no longer be a hero without rendering account; the captain is dis- cussed, the conqueror is inadmissible. A Louis XIV. învading the Palatinate would, in our day, be regarded as a robber. Already in the last century thèse truths began to dawn, Frederick II. in the présence of Voltaire felt and owned himself some- thing of a brigand. To be, materially, a great man, to be pompously violent, to reign by virtue of the sword-knot and the cockade, to forge a légal System upon the anvil of force, to hammer out justice and truth by dint of accomplished facts, to possess a genius for brutality, — this is to be great, if you will, but it is a coarse way of being great. Glory advertised by drum-beats is met with a shrug of the shoulder. Thèse sonorous heroes hâve, up to the présent day, deafened human reason, which begins to be fatigued by this majestic uproar. Reason stops eyes and ears before those author- ized butcheries called battles. The sublime cut- throats hâve had their day. Henceforth they can remain illustrious and august only in a certain rela- 388 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. tîve oblivîon. Humanity, grown older, asks to be relîeved of\them. The cannon's prey has begun to thînk, and, thinking twice, loses îts admiration for beîng made a target. A few figures, in passing, would do no harm. Our subject includes ail tragedy. The tragedy of the poets is not the only one; there îs the tragedy of the politicians and the statesmen. Would you know how much the latter tragedy costs? Heroes hâve an enemy named finance. For a long time the amount of money paid for that kînd of glory was unknown. In order to disguise the total, there were convenîent little fireplaces, like that in which Louis XIV. burned the accounts of Versailles. That day the smoke of one thousand millions of francs issued from the royal stove-pipe. The nations did not so much as look. Nowadays the nations hâve one great virtue, — they are stingy. They know that prodigality is the mother of hu- miliation. They keep score, they understand double-entry book-keeping. Henceforth there is a débit and crédit account with Warlike Glory, which is thus rendered impossible. The greatest warrior of modem times is not Napoléon, ît is Pitt. Napoléon waged war; Pitt created war. It is Pitt who willed ail the wars of the Révolution and of the Empire. He is their fountain-head. Replace Pitt by Fox, and that outrageous battle of twenty-three years would be deprived of its motive-power ; there would be no coalition. Pitt was the soûl of the coalition ; and, he dead, his soûl still animated the universal war. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 389 Hère îs what Pîtt cost England and the world; we add this bas-relief to his pedestal : — First, the expenditure of men. From 1791 to 18 14, France, constrained and forced, wrestling alone against Europe confederated by England, expended in slaughter for military glory — and also, let us add, for the defence of her terrîtory — five millions of men ; that is, six hundred men per day. Europe, including France, expended sixteen millions six hundred thousand men ; that îs, two thousand men destroyed daily for a perîod of twenty-three years. Secondly, the expenditure of money. Unfortu- nately, we hâve no authentic account, except the account of England. From 1791 to 18 14, Eng- land, in order to get France crushed by Europe, în- curred a debt of twenty milliards three hundred and sixteen millions four hundred and sixty thou- sand and fifty-three francs. Divide this sum by the number of men killed, at the rate of two thou- sand per day for twenty-three years, and you arrive at the resuit that each corpse stretched on the field of battle cost England alone fifty pounds sterling. Add the^ figures for ail Europe, — numbers un- known, but enormous. With thèse seventeen millions of men the Euro- pean population of Australia might hâve been formed. With the eight hundred millions of Eng- lish pounds sterling shot from the cannon's mouth, the face of the earth might hâve been changed, civilization planted everywhere, and ignorance and poverty suppressed throughout the world. 390 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. England pays eight hundred millions sterling for the two statues of Pitt and of Wellington. It is fine to hâve heroes, but it îs a costly luxury. Poets are less expensive. CHAPTER II. The discharge of the warrior îs sîgned. Hîs splendor is fading in the distance. Nimrod the Great, Cyrus the Great, Sennacherib the Great, Sesostris the Great, Alexander the Great, Pyrrhus the Great, Hannibal the Great, Frederick the Great, Caesar the Great, Timour the Great, Louis the Great, still other Greats, — ail this greatness îs passing away. To think that we indiscriminately reject thèse men would be a mistake. Fîve or six of those just named hâve in our eyes a legitimate title to glory; they hâve even mingled some good wîth their havoc ; a final estimate of them is embarrass- ing to the thinker of absolute equity, who is forced to weigh in almost equal scale the harmful and the useful. Others hâve been nothing but harmful. Thèse are numerous, înnumerable even ; for the masters of the world are légion. The thinker is the weîgher ; clemency is his dis- tinction. Let us then admit that those who hâve done only evil may plead one extenuating circum- stance, — imbecility. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, 39 1 They hâve still another excuse, — the mental condition of the race at the tîme of their advent ; the modifiable but obstructive realities of their environment. Not men, but things, are tyrants. The true tyrants are the frontier, the beaten track, routine, the blindness of fanaticism, deafness and dumbness caused by diversity of language, dispute caused by diversity of weights and measures and coin, hâte born of dispute, war born of hâte. AU thèse ty- rants hâve a single name, — Séparation. Division, whence issues the Reign, is the despot în the abstract state. Even the tyrants of flesh are mère things. Ca- ligula is much more a fact than a man, a resuit rather than a living being. The Roman proscriber, dictator, or caesar, prohibits fire and water to the vanquished, — that is, deprives them of life. One day of Gelon represents twenty thousand pro- scripts ; one day of Tiberius, thirty thousand ; one day of SuUa, seventy thousand. Vitellius, being ill one evening, sees a house lighted up for a merry-making. ** Do they think me dead ? " says Vitellius. It is Junius Blesus supping with Tus- cus Caecina. The Emperor sends a cup of poison to thèse drinkers, that, by the fatal conclusion of too merry a night, they may feel that Vitellius still lives.^ Otho and this Vitellius make friendly ex- changes of assassins. Under the Caesars, to die in one's bed is a marvel. Piso, to whom this hap- pened, îs remarked for this eccentricity. Valerius ^ " Reddendam pro intempestiva licentia mœstam et funebrem noctem (}ua sentiat vivere VitçUium et imperare/' 392 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. Asiatîcus has a garden that pleases the Emperor ; Statilius a face that displeases the Empress : trea- son! Valerius is strangled for havîng a garden, and Statilius for having a face. Basil IL, Emperor of the East, captures fifteen thousand Bulgarians ; he dîvides them into bands of a hundred each, and puts out the eyes of ail save one în each band. This one leads his ninety-nine blind comrades home to Bulgaria. History characterizes Basil II. as foUows : " He loved glory too much " (Delan- dine). Paul of Russia utters this axiom: **No man possesses power except whom the Emperor addresses, and his power continues only so long as the Word he hears." Philip V. of Spaîn, so fero- ciously calm at the auto-da-fe, is strîcken with fright at the thought of changing his shirt, and lies in bed six months at a time without washing and without trimming his nails, for fear of being poisoned by the scissors, or by the water în his basîn, or by his shirt, or by his shoes. Ivan, grandfather of Paul, puts a woman to the rack before admitting her to his bed; hangs a bride and sets the bridegroom on guard to keep the rope from being eut; has the father executed .by the son ; învents a method of sawing men in two with a cord ; burns Bariatinsky by a slow fire, and, deaf to his victim's shrieks, adjusts the firebrands with the end of his stick. Peter aspires to excel as an executioner; he practises the art of décapitation. At first he can eut off but a trifle of five heads a day; by strict application, however, he becomes expert enough to eut off twenty-five. What an accomplishment for a Czar, to be able to tear out WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, 393 a woman's breast wîth a stroke of the knout! What are ail thèse monsters? Symptoms, angry pustules, pus issuîng from an unhealthy body. They are hardly more responsîble than the sum of a column is responsîble for the figures. Basil, Ivan, Philip, Paul, and the rest, are the product of the vast envîroning stupidity, The Greek clergy hav- îng, for example, this maxim, " Who could make us judges of those who are our masters? " it fol- lows as a matter of course that a Czar, this same Ivan, should sew an archbishop in a bearskin and hâve him eaten by dogs. It îs right that the Czar amuse himself. Under Nero, the man whose brother has been put to death goes to the temple to gîve thanks to the gods; under Ivan, an im- paled boyard employs his death-agony of twenty- four hours in repeatîng : " O Lord, protect the Czar ! " The Princess Sanguzko comes weeping and upon her knees to présent a pétition to Nicho- las; she begs mercy for her husband, she im- plores the master to spare Sanguzko — a Pôle guilty of loving Poland — the terrible journey to Siberîa. Nicholas mutely lîstens, takes the pétition, and writes at the bottom the words, " On foot." Then Nicholas goes into the street, and the people throw themselves on the ground to kîss his boot What can you say? Nicholas is mad, his people îm- bruted. From the khan comes the knez, from the knez the tzar, from the tzar the czar, — a séries of phenomena rather than a lîneage of men. What îs more logical than that after this Ivan should come this Peter, after Peter, Nicholas, after Nicholas, Alexander ? You ail désire it more or less. The 394 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. tortured consent to the rack. You hâve yourselves made ** this Czar, half putrefied, half frozen," as says Madame de Staël. To be a nation, to be a force, and to witness thèse things, is to approve them. To be présent is to assent. He who as- sists at the crime assists the crime. The présence of the inert is an encouraging sign of abjection. Let it be added that, even before the commission of the crime, some pre-existîng corruption has given rise to the complicity; some foui fermenta- tion of original baseness engenders the oppressor. The wolf is the fact of the forest. He is the wild fruit of the defenceless solitude. Group and combine silence, darkness, ease of conquest, mon- strous înfatuation, abundance of prey, security in murder, the connivance of ail présent, weakness, want of weapons, abandonment, isolation, — from the point of intersection of ail thèse things springs the ferocious beast. A gloomy région, where no cries for succor can be heard, produces the tiger. A tîger is blindness armed and hungry. Is it a créature ? Hardly. The beast's claw is no more conscious than the thorn of the plant The fatal condition of things brings forth the unconscious organism. In point of personality, and apart from the power of killing for a living, the tiger does not exist. If Mourawieff thinks himself some one, he is mistaken. Bad men spring from bad things ; hence, let us correct the things. And hère we return to our starting-point : the extenuating circumstance of despotism is — idiocy. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, 395 We have just pleaded this extenuating cîrcum- stance. The idiotie despots, a légion, are the mob of the purple; but beyond and above them, at the im- measurable distances separating that which shines from that which stagnâtes, are the despots of genius. Among them are captains, conquerors, strong men of war, civilizers by force, ploughmen of the sword. Thèse we have just now recalled. The really great among them are Cyrus, Sesostris, Alexander, Hannibal, Caesar, Charlemagne, Napoléon; and, with the restrictions mentioned, we admire them. But we admire them on condition of their disap- pearance. Make room for better, greater men ! Are thèse greater, thèse better men anything new? No. Their line îs as ancient as the other, — more ancient, perhaps, for the thought must have preceded the deed, and the thinker goes before the fighter; but their place was taken, — taken by violence. This usurpation is about to cease; the thinker's hour has struck at last, his prédominance becomes évident. Civilization, returning to its truer vision, recognizes him as its sole founder; the brightness of hîs line outshines the rest; the future, like the past, belongs to him ; and his line it is that God will henceforward establish. 396 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. CHAPTER III. It îs évident that hîstory must be re-wrîtten. Up to the présent tîme it has nearly always been written from the petty standpoint of fact; it is time to Write it from the standpoint of principle. And this under penalty of becoming null and void. Royal deeds, warlike uproar, coronations, the marriage, baptism, and mourning of princes, exé- cutions and festivals, the splendor of one crushing ail, the insolence of régal birth, the prowess of sword and axe, great empires, heavy taxes, the tricks which chance plays chance, the world swayed by the haps of the first best head, — provided it be a crowned head ; the destiny of a century changed by a lance thrust by a giddy fellow against the skuU of an imbécile ; Louis XIV/s majestic fistula in ano ; the grave words of the dying Emperor Matthias to his physician, who was groping under his coverlet to feel his puise for the last time: " Erras, amice, hoc est membrum nostrum impéri- ale sacrocaesareum ; " Cardinal Richelieu, in the disguise of a shepherd, performing a castanet dance before the Queen of France in the little villa of the Rue de Gaillon ; Hildebrand completed by Cisne- ros ; the little dogs of Henri III. ; the varions Potemkins of Catherine II., — hère Orloff, there Godoy, etc. ; a great tragedy with a paltry intrigue, — such, down to our own day, was history, oscilla- WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 397 tîng between throne and altar, givîng one car to Dangeau, the other to Dom Calmet, sanctimonious rather than severe, not comprehending the real transitions from âge to âge, incapable of dîstin- guishing the turning-points of civilization, exhibit- ing the human race as climbing up by ladders of stupid dates, learned in puerilities while ignorant of law, of justice, and of truth, — a history modelled rather upon Le Ragois than upon Tacitus. So true is this that Tacitus has, in our time, been made the object of an officiai réquisition. We are not to be weary of repeating the fact that Tacitus is, like Juvenal, Suetonius, and Lampridius, the object of spécial and well-earned hatred. The day when the professors of rhetoric in the col- lèges place Juvenal above Vîrgil, and Tacitus above Bossuet, will be the morrow of humanity's day of deliverance. Before this happens, ail forms of op- pression shall hâve disappeared, — from the slave- dealer to the Pharisee, from the cabin where the slave weeps, to the chapel where the eunuch sîngs. Cardinal du Perron, who receîved for Henri IV. the strokes of the Pope's staff, was kind enough to say : " I despise Tacitus.*' Down to the présent time, history has been a courtier. The double identification of the kîng wîth the nation and with God, is the work of this courtly history. The Grâce of God begets the Right Di- vine. Louis XIV. déclares : " I am the state." Madame du Barry, a plagiarist of Louis XIV., gives to Louis XV. the name of France ; and the pompously haughty saying of the great Asiatic 398 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, King of Versailles ends with the words : " France, thy coffee is going to the devil ! " Bossuet wrote without winking, although palli- ating the facts hère and there, the frightful legend of the crime-laden thrones of antiquity ; and, apply- ing to the surface of things his vague théocratie déclamation, he satisfies himself with this formula : "God holds in his hand the heart of kings." Such îs not the case, for two reasons, — God has no hand, and kings hâve no heart. But of course we are speaking of the kings of Assyria only. This elder History is a good old dame to princes. When a Royal Highness says, " History, do not look this way," she shuts her eyes. With the face of a harlot, she has imperturbably denied the dreadful skull-crushing helmet with its inner spike, intended by the Archduke of Austrîa for the Swiss magistrate, Gundoldingen. This instrument is to- day hanging upon a nail in the town-hall of Lucerne, — any one can see it for himself; but History dénies it still. Moréri calls the massacre of Saint Bâr- tholomew " a disturbance." Chaudon, another bi- ographer, thus characterizes the author of the witticism for Louis XV. cited above: "A lady of the court, Madame du Barry." History accepts as an attack of apoplexy the mattress under which John n. of England smothers the Duke of Glouces- ter at Calais.^ Why, in his coffin at the Escurial, îs the head of the Infante Don Carlos severed from the trunk? The father, Philip H., replies : ''Because, the Infante having died a natural death, the coffin when made was found too short, and the head had 1 So in the original. Richard II. is probably meant — Tr. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 399 to be eut off." History blandly accepts thîs coffin story. But that the father should hâve had his son beheaded, — out upon it ! Only démagogues would say such things. The ingenuousness with which History glorifies the fact, whatever and however impious it be, appears nowhere better than in Cantemir and Karamsin, — the one the Turkish, the other the Russian historian. The Ottoman fact and the Muscovite fact évince, when confronted and com- pared, the Tartar identity. Moscow is no less darkly Asiatic than Stamboul. Ivan bears sway over the one as Mustapha over the other. Be- tween this Christianity and this Mahometanism the distinction is imperceptible. The pope is brother to the ulema, the boyard to the pasha, the knout to the cord, and the moujik to the mute. To the passers in the streets there is little to choose between Selim who transfixes them with arrows, and Basil who lets bears loose upon them. Cantemir, a man of the South, a former Moldavian hospodar and long a Turkish subject, feels, although he has passed over to the Russians, that in deifying des- potism he does not displease the Czar Peter ; and he prostrates his metaphors before the sultans. This grovelling is Oriental, and somewhat Occi- dental too. The sultans are divine, their scimitar is sacred, their dagger sublime, their extermina- tions magnanimous, their parricides good. They call themselves clément, as the Furies call them- selves Eumenides. The blood they shed smokes with an odor of incense in Cantemir, and the pro- longed assassination which constitutes their reign 402 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. pretty much the whole secret of thîs specîes of hîstory. It also has its sale of indulgences. Honor and profit are divided: the master gets the honor, the hîstorian the profit. Procopîus is a prefect, and, what is more, Illustrîous by decree, — a fact which in no wise debars hîm from being a traitor; Bossuet is a bishop; Fleury is prelate- prior of Argenteuil ; Karamsin is a senator ; Can- temir is a prince. Best of ail is to be paid succes- sively by For and by Against, and, like Fontanes, to be made a senator for idolatry, and a peer of France for spitting upon the idol. What is going on at the Louvre? at the Vatican? in the Seraglio? at Buen Retiro? at Windsor? at Schônbrunn? at Potsdam? at the Kremlin? at Oranienbaum? That is the question. The hu- man race is interested in nothing outside of thèse half-score of houses, of which history is the door-keeper. Nothing that relates to war, to the warrior, to the prince, to the throne, to the court, is trifling. He who lacks a talent for solemn puerility cannot be a historian. A question of étiquette, a hunt, a gala, a grand levée, a retinue, Maximilian's triumph, the number of carriages bearing ladies to the King's camp before Mans, the necessity of having vices in conformity with his Majesty's foibles, the clocks of Charles V., the locks of Louis XVL ; how Louis XV. announced himself to be a good king by refus- ing a broth before his coronation; and how the Prince of Wales sits in the House of Lords not as Prince of Wales but as Duke of Cornwall ; and how drunken Augustus made Prince Lubormirsky, WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, 403 Starost of Kasimîroff, under-cupbearer to the Crown ; and how Charles of Spain gave the com- mand of the army of Catalonia to Pimentel, be- cause the Pimentels had been lords of Benavente sînce 1308; and how Frederick of Brandenburg granted a fief of forty thousand crowns to a hunts- man who had enabled him to kill a fine stag ; and how Louis Antoine, Grand Master of the Teutonic Order and Prince Palatine, died at Liège of disap- poîntment at not having been able to get himself elected bishop; and how the Princess Borghese, dowager of Mirandola, and related to the Pope, married the Prince of Cellamare, son of the Duke of Giovenazzo ; and how my Lord Seaton, a Mont- gomery, followed James IL to France; and how * the Emperor ordered the Duke of Mantua, a vassal of the Empire, to drive the Marquis Amorati from his court; and how there came to be always two Cardinals Barberini living, etc., — ail that is impor- tant business. A snub-nose is made historié. Two little meadows adjacent to the ancient Mark and to the Duchy of Zell are mémorable for having almost caused a war between England and Prussia. In fact the skill of the governing and the apathy of the obeying classes hâve so arranged and confused affairs that ail thèse régal nothings take their places in human destiny, and war and peace, the movement of armîes and fleets, the re- coil or the advance of civilization, dépend upon Queen Anne's cup of tea or the Dey of Algiers' fly-flap. Hîstory stands behind the royal seat, registering thèse fooleries. 404 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. Knowîng so many things, it is quite natural that ît should be ignorant of some. Should you be so curious as to ask it the name of the English mer- chant who first, in 1612, entered China from the north; of the glass-workman who first, in 1663, established a manufactory of crystal glass ; of the citizen who, under Charles VIII., carried in the States-General at Tours the fruitful principle of the élective magistracy, — a principle subsequently adroitly suppressed; of the pilot who, in 1405, discovered the Canary Isles; of the Byzantine lute-maker who, in the eighth century, by the invention of the organ, gave to music its most sonorous voice; of the Campanian mason who originated the clock by placing the first sun-dial upon the temple of Quirinus at Rome; of the Roman toll-coUector who, by the construction of the Appian Way in the year 312 B. c, invented the paving of towns ; of the Egyptian carpenter who conceived the dove-tail, — one of the keys of archi- tecture, found under the obelisk of Luxor ; of the Chaldaean goatherd who, by the observation of the signs of the zodiac, founded astronomy and gave a starting-point to Anaximenes; of the Corinthian calker who, nine years before the first Olympiad, calculated the force of the triple lever, conceived the trirème, and built a towboat two thousand six hundred years before the first steamboat ; of the Macedonian ploughman who discovered the first gold-mine on Mount Pangaeus, — thèse names history cannot give you; thèse people are un- known to history. Who are thèse? A ploughman, a calker, a goat- WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 405 herd, a carpenter, a toll-gatherer, a mason, a lute- maker, a sailor, a burgher, and a merchant. The dignity of history must be preserved. In Nuremberg, near the Aegidienplatz, in a room on the second floor of a house facing the church of St. Aegidius, there lies upon an iron tripod a wooden globe twenty inches in diameter, covered with a dingy vellum streaked with lines whîch were once red and yellow and green. Upon this globe is a sketch of the earth's divisions as they could be conceived in the fifteenth centufy. At the twenty-fourth degree of latitude, under the sîgn of Cancer, there is vaguely indicated a kind of island called " Antilia," which attracted, one day, the attention of two men. The one who had made the globe and drawn Antilia, showed this island to the other, laid his finger upon it, and said, " There it is." The man looking on was Christopher Co- lumbus; the man who said, ** There it is," was Martin Behaim. Antilia was America. Of Fer- nando Cortez, who ravaged America, history speaks; but not of Martin Behaim, who guessed its existence. If a man has " eut to pièces " his fellow-men, if he has " put them to the edge of the sword,'' if he has " made them bite the dust," — horrible phrases, which hâve grown hideously familiar, — whatever this man's name may be, you will find it in history. Search there for the name of him who invented the compass, — you will not find it ! In 1747, in the full tide of the eîghteenth cen- tury, under the very eyes of the philosophers, the battles of Raucoux and of Laffeld, the siège of the 406 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. Sas van Ghent, and the taking of Bergen-op-Zoom, overshadow and hide the sublime dîscovery of electricîty, which is to-day effecting the trans- formation of the world. Voltaire himselfat aboutthat time is distractedly celebrating who knows what exploit of Trajan (read, Louis XV.). From this history îs evolved a kind of public stupidity. This history is almost everywhere superposed upon éducation. If you doubt this, see, among others, the publications of Périsse Brothers, — designed, says a parenthesis, for pri- mary schools. It makes us laugh if a prince assumes the name of an animal. We ridicule the Emperor of China for having himself styled " His Majesty the Dra- gon," and we ourselves complacently talk of "Monseigneur the Dauphin." History is domestic; the historian is a mère master-of-ceremonies to the centuries. In the model court of Louis the Great there are four historians, as there are four bedchamber violinists. Lulli leads the latter, Boileau the former. In this old-fashioned history — the only style authorized down to 1789, and classic' in the com- plète sensé of the word — the best narrators, even the honest ones, of whom there are a few, even those who think themselves free, remain mechani- cally subordinate, make a patchwork of traditions, yield to the force of habit, receive the countersîgn in the antechamber, go with the crowd in accept- îng the stupid divinity of the coarse pcrsonages of the foreground, — kings, " potentates," "pontiffs," WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, 407 soldîers, — and, though devoutly believing them- selves historians, end by wearing the livery of hîstoriographers, and are lackeys without know- îng it. This history is taught, imposed, commanded, and recommended ; ail young minds are more or less imbued with it. The mark remains ; their thought suffers from it, recovering only with difficulty; school-boys are compelled to learn it by heart, and I, who am speaking, was, as a child, its victim. This history contains everything except history, — displays of princes, of " monarchs," and of cap- tains. Of the people, the laws, the manners, very little; of letters, arts, sciences, philosophy, the trend of universal thought, — in one word, of man, — nothing. Civilization is made to date by reigns, not by progress. Some king forms a stage. The true relays, the relays] of great men, are nowhere indicated. It is explained how Francis II. suc- ceeds Henri IL, how Charles IX. succeeds Fran- cis IL, and Henri III. Charles IX.; but no one teaches how Watt succeeds Papin, and how Fulton succeeds Watt. Behind the heavy upholstery of hereditary monarchy the mysterious dynasty of genius is scarcely glimpsed. The smoky torch upon the opaque façade of royal accessions hîdes the starry light streaming down upon the centuries from the creators of civilization. Not a single one of this séries of historians points to the divine lineage of human miracles, that applied logic of Providence ; not one exhibits the manner in which progress gives birth to* progress. It would be shameful not to know that Philip IV. comes after 408 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. Philip III., and Charles IL after Philip IV. ; but that Descartes continues Bacon and that Kant continues Descartes, that Las Casas continues Columbus, that Washington continues Las Casas and that John Brown continues and rectifies Wash- ington, that John Huss continues Pelagius, that Luther continues John Huss and that Voltaire continues Luther, — it is almost a scandai to be aware of thèse things. CHAPTER IV. It îs tîme to change ail this. It îs time that men of action should step back, and that men of thought should take the lead. The summit is the head. Where thought is, there power exists. It is time that the genius take precedence of the hero. It is time to render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to the book the things that belong to the book. Such a poem, such a drama, such a novel, is doing more service than ail the courts of Europe put together. It is time that history should proportion itself to reality, that it should give every influence its ascertained value, that it should cease to thrust régal masks upon epochs made in the image of poets and of philosophers. To whom belongs the eighteenth century, — to Louis XV., or to Voltaire? Compare Versailles and Ferney, and consioer from which of the two sources civilization flows. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, 409 A century is a formula; an epoch îs an ex- pressed thought. One such thought expressed, Cîvilization passes to another. The centuries are the phrases of Cîvilization; what she says hère she does not repeat there. But thèse mysterious phrases are lînked together ; logic — the logos — îs wîthîn them, and their séries constîtutes pro- gress. In ail thèse phrases, expressions of a single thought, the divine thought, we are slowly deci- phering the word Fraternîty. AU light is at some point condensed înto a flame; likewise every epoch is condensed in a man. The man dead, the epoch is concluded. God turns over the leaf. Dante dead, a period is placed at the end of the thirteenth century ; John Huss may corne. Shakespeare dead, a period is placed at the end of the sixteenth century. After this poet, who contains and epitomizes ail philoso- phy, may come the philosophers, — Pascal, Des- cartes, Molière, Le Sage, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Diderot, Beaumarchais. Voltaire dead, a period is placed at the end of the eighteenth century. The French Révolution, that winding-up of the first social form of Christianîty, may come. Each of thèse various periods, which we call epochs, has its dominant note. What îs this dom- inant, — a head wearing a crown, or a head bearîng a thought? Is it an aristocracy, or an idea? Make your own answer. Consider where the power lies. Weigh Francis I. against Gargantua; put the whole of chivalry into the balance with ' Don Quixote.' Each one to his own place, thercforc. About 4IO WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. face! And now consîder the centuries as thej are. In the first rank, mind ; in the second, thîrd twentieth, soldîers and princes. Down wîth th< warrior; the thinker retakes possession of th< pedestal. Pull down Alexander, and set up Aris totle. Strange that to this day people should hav( read the Iliad in such a manner as to overshadov Homer by Achilles ! It is time, I repeat, to change ail this. Th< initiative, indeed, is taken. Noble minds are al ready at work ; the future history is approaching some superb partial rehandlings exist as speci mens; a gênerai recasting is about to take place Ad usum populù Compulsory éducation requîre: true history; true history is begun, and will b( made. The old medals will be re-mînted: that whicl was the reverse will become the face ; that whicl was the head will become the tail ; Urban VIII. wil be the reverse of Galileo. The true profile of humanity will reappear upoi the various prints of civilization offered by th< succession of the centuries. The historical effigy will no longer be the mai king, it will be the man people. No one shall reproach us with failing to insis that real and veracious history, while pointing t( the real sources of civilization, will not underesti mate the appréciable utility of the sceptre-holder and sword-racks at certain moments and in près ence of certain human conditions. Wrestling matches require some equality between the twc combatants; barbarity must sometimes bc pittcc WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, 41 1 agaînst barbarism. There are cases of violent progress. Caesar îs good in Cimmeria, and Alex- ander in Asia. But to Alexander and to Caesar the second rank suffices. The veracious history, the true history, the dé- finitive history, charged henceforward with the éducation of that royal child, the people, will reject ail fiction, will be wanting in complaisance, will logically classify phenomena, will unravel hidden causes, will study, philosophically and scientifically, the successive disorders of humanity, and will take less account of great sabre-strokes than of great strokes of thought The deeds of the lîght will form the van ; Pythagoras will be a greater event than Sesostris. We said just now that heroes, crepuscular men, are relatively bright în the darkness ; but what is a conqueror beside a sage? what is the invasion of kingdoms compared with the opening of the mind? The winners of minds overshadow the winners of provinces. The true conqueror is the man who does the thinking for others. In the coming history, the slave iEsop and the slave Plautus will take precedence of kings; such a vagabond will outweigh such a Victor, such an actor will outweigh such an emperor. To make what we are saying obvious by examples, it is certainly useful that a man of power should hâve marked the period of stagnation between the crumbling of the Latin world and the outgrowth of the Gothic world ; it is useful that another man of power, following the first, the shrewd after the bold, should hâve outlined, in the form of a catholic empire, the future universal group of 412 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. nations and the wholesome encroachments of Europe upon Afrîca, Asia, and America. But ît is stiU more useful to hâve made the * Divina Com- media' and *Hamlet; ' no wicked deed is mingled with thèse master-works ; hère the account of the civilizer bears no débit charge of nations crushed ; and the enlargement of the human mind being taken as a resuit, Dante counts for more than Charlemagne, Shakespeare for more than Charles the Fifth. In history, as it is to be made upon the pattern of absolute truth, that commonplace intelligence, that unconscious and vulgar being, the ''Non pluri- bus impar," the sultan-sun of Marly, becomes merely the almost mechanical fabricator of the shelter required by the thinker who wore the theatrical mask, — of the environment of îdeas and of men requisite for the philosophy of Alceste. Louis XIV. is bed-maker to Molière. Thèse reversais of rôle will exhibit characters în their true light; the new historical optics will map out the still chaotic sky of civilization ; per- spective, that geometrical justice, will take pos- session of the past, placing this in the foreground, that in the background ; every man will résume his real stature ; tiaras, crowns, and other head-dresses will serve simply to render dwarfs ridiculous ; stupid prostrations will disappear. From such readjust- ments will stream forth the right. That great judge, We AU, having henceforth as a standard a clear conception of that which is ab- solute and of that which is relative, the déductions and restitutions will take place of themselves. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 41 3 The innate moral sensé of man wîll find its bear- ings. It will no longer be forced to ask itself questions like this : Why do people révère in Louis XV., and in the rest of the royalty, the act for which they are at the same moment burning Deschauffours in the Place de Grève? The author- ity of the king will no longer impose a false moral weight. The facts, well balanced, will balance con- science well. A good light will arise, mild to the sons of men, serene, équitable. Henceforward there is to be no interposition of clouds between the truth and the brain of man. Définitive ascen- sion of the good, the just, the beautiful, to the zénith of civilization. Nothing can escape the law of simplification. By the sheer force of things, the material side of events and of men scales off and vanishes. There is no such thing as solidity of darkness. What- ever the mass or the block, every compound of ashes — and matter is nothing else — returns to ashes. The idea of the grain of dust is embodied in the very word " granité." Pulverization is inévitable. Ail those granités, oligarchy, aristoc- racy, theocracy, are the promised prey of the four winds. The idéal alone is indestructible. Nothing is abiding but mind. In this indefinite inundation of light called civili- zation, phenomena of levelling and of setting up are taking place. The imperious dawn pénétrâtes everywhere, enters as master, and enforces obédi- ence. The light is working ; under the great eye of posterity, before the light of the nineteenth century, a simplification is going on, the fungus 414 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, is collapsing, glory falls like the leaf, great names are dîvided up. Take Moses, for example. In Moses there are three glories, — the captain, the lawgiver, the poet. Of thèse three men contained in Moses, where is the captain to-day? In the dark, with the brigands and assassins. Where is the lawgiver? Buried under the rubbish of dead religions. Where is the poet? By the side of iEschylus. The day has an irrésistible corrosive power upon the things of night. Hence a new historié sky over our heads. Hence a new philosophy of cause and effect. Hence a new aspect of facts. Some minds, however, whose honest and austère solicitude is not displeasing, object: "You hâve said that men of genius form a dynasty; we are as unwilling to submit to this dynasty as to any other." This is to misunderstand, to be fright- ened by a word when the thought is reassuring. The very law which requires that mankind should hâve no owners, requires that it should hâve guides. To be enlightened is the reverse of being subjected. Between " Homo sum " and " I am the state " is the whole space between fraternity and tyranny. The march forward requires a directing hand; to rebel against the pilot scarcely advances the ship ; one does not see what would be gained by throw- ing Columbus overboard. The word, *'This way," never humiliated the man who was seeking the road. At night, I accept the authority of the torches. Furthermore, there is little that is op- pressive in the dynasty of genius, whose kîngdom is Dante's exile, whose palace is Cervantes' donjon, WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, 415 whose budget is Isaîah*s wallet, whose throne is Job's dunghill, whose sceptre is Homer's staff. Let us résume. CHAPTER V. Mankind no longer owned, but guided: such is the new aspect of things. Henceforward history is bound to reproduce thîs new aspect of things. It is a strànge thing to alter the past ; but that is what history is about to un- dertake. By lying ? No ; by telling the truth. History has been only a picture; it is about to become a mirror. This new reflection of the past will modify the future. The former King of Westphalia, a man of wît, was one day examining an inkstand upon the table of some one we know. The writer at whose house Jérôme Bonaparte was at that moment, had brought back from a trip to the Alps, made in company with Charles Nodier some years before, a bit of steatitic serpentine, carved and hoUowed înto an inkstand, which he had purchased of a chamoîs- hunter of the Mer-de-Glace. Jérôme Bonaparte was looking at this. **What is it?" he asked. "My inkstand," replied the writer. Then he added : " It is steatite. Admire Nature, who makes this charmîng green stone out of a little dirt and oxide." "I admire much more the men," 41 6 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. responded Jérôme Bonaparte, " who make an ink- stand out of this stone." For a brother of Napoléon, this was not a bad reply; and he should be credited with it, for the inkstand is to destroy the sword. The diminution of the men of war, of violence, of prey; the indefinite and superb expansion of the men of thought and of peace; the entrance of the real giants upon the scène of action : this is one of the greatest facts of our great era. There is no more sublime and pathetic spectacle, — mankînd*s deliverance from above, the potentates put to flight by the dreamers, the prophet crushîng the hero, the sweeping away of violence by thought, the heaven cleansed, a majestic expulsion ! Lift up your eyes, the suprême drama is enact- ing ! The légions of light are in full pursuit of the hordes of flame. The masters are going out, the liberators are coming in. The hunters of men, the trailers of armies, Nim- rod, Sennacherib, Cyrus, Rameses, Xerxes, Cam- byses, Attila, Genghîs Khan, Tamerlane, Alexander, Caesar, Bonaparte, — ail thèse vast, ferocious men are vanishing. Slowly they flicker out ; now they touch the horizon ; mysteriously the darkness attracts them ; they hâve kinship with the shades, — hence their fatal descent ; their resemblance to the other phe- nomena of night draws them on to this dreadful union with blind immensity — submersion of ail light. Oblivion, that shadow of darkness, awaits them. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 417 They are hurled down, but they remain formi- dable. Insuit not what has been great. Hootings would be misbecomîng at the burial of heroes ; the thinker should remaîn grave în présence of this enshroudîng. The old glory abdicates ; the strong are lyîng down. Clemency to thèse vanquished conquerors ! Peace to thèse fallen warriors ! The shades of the grave interpose between their lîght and ours. Not without a kind of pious terror can one behold stars changing to spectres. While smitten with the fatal wanness of approach- ïng doom, the flamboyant pleiad of the men of violence descends the steep slope to the gulf of de- vouring time ; ïo ! at the other extremîty of space, where the last cloud has but now faded, in the deep sky of the future, azuré forevermore, rises, resplen- dent, the sacred galaxy of the true stars, — Orpheus, Hermès, Job, Homer, iEschylus, Isaiah, Ezekîel, Hippocrates, Phidias, Socrates, Sophocles, Plato, Aristotle, Archimedes, Euclid, Pythagoras, Lucre- tius, Plautus, Juvenal, Tacitus, Saint Paul, John of Patmos, Tertullian, Pelagius, Dante, Gutenberg, Joan of Arc, Christopher Columbus, Luther, Michael Angelo, Copernicus, Galileo, Rabelais, Calderon, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Rembrandt, Kepler, Milton, Molière, Newton, Descartes, Kant, Piranesi, Beccaria, Diderot, Voltaire, Beethoven, Fulton, Montgolfier, Washington; and the mar- vellous constellation, brighter from moment to moment, radiant as a tiara of celestial diamonds, shines in the clear horizon, and, as it rises, blends with the boundless dawn of Jésus Christ. 27 INDEX. /EscHYLUS, characterized, 47-48 ; a grand ruîn, 83, 84 ; not understood by commonplace minds, 123 ; vast and terrible nature of his drama, 123-125 ; représentation of a play described, 126-131 ; a target for hâte during life, 132, 133 ; glory after death, 133-135; how his Works were added to the Alexan- drian library, 135-137; consulted by Fathers of the Church, 138, 139 ; destroyed by Omar, 139-142 ; Christ prophesied in the * Prome- theus/ 138; the lest dramas, 143- 146; Oriental character and style, T46-148 ; a Pythagorean, 149; epitaph, 149 ; his geography, 149- 151; his fauna, 151, 152; a priest of Nature, 152; his bold familiar- ity, 152, 153; his comedy, 156; a favorite in the Greek colonies, 159- 164; may copies of his works be discovered? 164, 165; sources of our knowledge of him, 168, 169; affinity with Shakespeare, 169 ; Prometheus compared with Ham- let, 228-239; iSschylus contrasted with Shakespeare, 284; his opin- ion of art for art' s sake, 316; not degraded by his partisanship, 337. Agrippina, mother of Nero, 6x. Alexandrian library, its size, 136; possessed the unique copy of iËschylus, 137-139; destroyed by Omar, 139-142. Anaxagorasy his cosmography, 107. Aristophanes, his opinion of ^schy- lus, 133 ; his affinity with iEschy- lus, 153-156; his antique, sacred immodesty, 154, 155 ; hisantipathy for Socrates, 155. Art, and Nature, 36, 37; relation of God to human art, 37; unity of art and nature, 99, 100; non- perfectibility the law of art, 101- 104; art contrasted with science, 105-116; enjoys a laugh, 157; art not degraded by descending to humanity, 314-316; no loss of beauty from goodness, 320; origin of the phrase, " Art for art's sake," 321, 322. (Sââ Poetry.) Baylb of Rotterdam, his profound irony, 330. Beethoven, the typîcal man of Gcr- many, 87, 91. Behaim, Martin, and Columbus, 405. Bible, the, poetry of, 316, 317; not less poetical for taking part in human affairs, iâ.; contrasted with Shakespeare, 355, 356. Bonaparte, Jérôme, anecdote of, 415, 416. Books, the best dvilizers, 96-98; their immortality due to Guten- berg, 166-167; Ezekiel's allegoiy of, 296, 297. Bossuet, his opinion of Moliàre, 252 ; his histP'""<-.398. Bourgeois, (Su l'iulistines.) 420 INDEX. Calcraft, fhe hangman, more re- nowned in England than Shake- speare, 361. Caligula, the emperori characterized, 59. Caliminy against men of genius, 252- 254. Cantemir, historian of Turkey, 399, 400. Carthage, like England, except that she had no poet, 349, 350. Cervantes, characterized, 76-80; La Harpe on comédies, 252. Chrysîppus of Tarsus, errpneous be- liefsof, 111-113. Civilization, not yet at its goal of beneficence and fratemity, 327- 330- Classic school of letters {écoU clas- sique)y eschews imagination, 205- 211; characterized, 288, 289; out- grown, 303, 304; its view of the poet's service, 334, 335. Claudius, the emperor, characterized, 59, 60. Columbus and Behaim, anecdote of , 405. Cordelia, characterized, 243, 244, 246-248. Corneille, and the Marquise de Con- tades, X04; anecdote of his statue at Rouen, 367. Dante, characterized, 69-71 ; quot- ed, 197 ; re-created himself in his poem, 227 ; Chaudon*s opinion of, 251 ; his work greater than that of Charlemagne, 411, 412. Danton, a successor of Voltaire, 372. Death, the end of ail to the great captain, 341-345 ; the beginning of life to the thinker, 345-348. Desdemona and Ophelia, sisters, 198 ; Desdemona characterized, 242, 243. Elizabeth, Queen, her warit of regard for Shakespeare, 30 ; char- acterized, 355; typical of Eng- land, ib. England, her debt to Shakespeare, 348, 349 ; selfishness, 349 ; corn- pared to Carthage and Sparta, 349? 350^ i^i^de superior to them by Shakespeare, ib,; her statue of Shakespeare, 351 ; h^ statues of kings, gênerais, and states- men, 351, 352 ; her generous press, 352 ; her flunkeyism, 353, 354 ; tardiness in rendering jus- tice to Shakespeare, 354, 355; her prudishness, 356-360; dog- ged coidness toward Shake- speare, 358 ; tone of some English critics of Shakespeare, 360, 361. Epie poetry. Oriental, 84-86 ; Span* ish and German, 85, 86. Ezekiel, characterized, 49-53. Falstaff, characterized, 199. Fénelon, hb opinion of Molière, 252. Freedom, essential to humanity, 298-301. Genius, extravagance and mon- strousness, 92-94 ; its divine mis> sion, 178-182 ; subject to calumny, 251-254 ; its unshackled nature, 261-263; attitude of Philistinism toward, 263-267 ; to be accepted like nature, 277-279; humanity of true genius, 318, 319 ; death a libération of, 345-348. Germany, characterized, and her art described, 87-92. God, meaning of word, 37 ; His créa- tive force unexhausted, 183-185; use of His name prohibited upon the English stage, 359. (.Ss^ Jésus.) Goethe, his indifférence to good and evil, 331 ; Hugo unjust to him, 332 (note). Good taste, an incubus upon art, 92 ; sobriety, bashfulness, and weakness of the French ecolt classi^f 205-^11. INDEX. 421 Greece, cause of her immortality, 1 59 ; how the drama was fostered in her colonies, 159-164. Greene, Robert, attack upon Shake- speare, 190 (and note). Gutenberg, a redeemer, 166, 167. Hamlbt, contrasted with Prome- theus, 228-230 ; characterized, 232 -239 ; greatness of, 412. History, the false, with many ex- empUfications, 396-408; the true, 408-413- Homer, characterized, 42-44 ; his Olympians far from impossible, 333- Hugo, François-Victor, translator of Shakespeare, Préface ; the unmuz- zler of Shakespeare, 211. Hugo, Victor, exile at Marine Ter- race, 3-7 ; anecdote of youth, 116, 117; his ignorance of English literature, 194 (note) ; his enthu- siastîc admiration for works of ge- nius, 279, 280 ; unjust to Goethe, 332 (note). Iago, characterized, 242, 243. Imagination, abhorred by the école classique^ 205-209. Inspiration, nature of poètes, 37-40. Isaiah, characterized, 48, 49. JÉsus, use of the name in ' Hemani * prohibited, 359 (note); dawn of hiseraof peace, 417. Joan of Arc, her greatness, 362 ; like Shakespeare, without a monument, ib, ; like him, sneered at by Vol- taire, 363, 364. Job, characterized, 44-47. John the apostle, characterized, 62- 65. Johnson, Dr. Samuel, opinion of Shakespeare, 189, 192. Jonson, Ben, relation to Shake- speare, 29, 30 ; remark on Shake- speare's conversation, 252. Juvenal, characterized, 56-58 ; a great justidary, 322-324. Karamsin, historian of Russia, 399. 400- Lear, characterized, 243-249. Literature. (Se^ Poetry.) Locomotion, improvements in, 108. London, in Shakespeare*s time, 12, 13- Lucretius, characterized, 53-56; his view of religion, 117; liberated thought from superstition, 338. Macbeth, characterized, 240-242. Macchiavelli, his real meaning, 305, 306. Malone, critic and whitewasher of Shakespeare, 35. Man, his goal not that of the brute, 301, 302; hîs progress must be through intellectual advancement, 307, 309» Marine Terrace, 3, 7. Military science, improvements in, Ï06, 107. Milton, the Abbé Trublet on, 252 ; accused of venality, 254. Mind, compared to océan, 7, 8. Mirabeau, his opinion of ^schylus, 122, 123. Mob. (5«tfPeople.) Molière, disapproved of by Fénelon and Bossuet, 252 ; Louis XIV. his bed-maker, 412. Monument to a great man, value of, 367. (See Statues.) Muses, the, dangerous companions for the " sober" poet, 209. Music, the highest expression of the German spirit found in, 90, 91. Napoléon Bonaparte, anecdote of, 258 ; anecdote of, 287 ; his view of the end of ail, 341, 342 ; com- pared with Pitt, 388; his treat- ment by historians, 401. Nero, the emperor, characterized, 60. Nineteenth century, the child of the French Révolution, 371, 376. 422 INDEX. Océan, compared with mînd, 7, 8. Omar, destroys the Alexandrian li^ brary and iEschylus, 139-142. Ophelia and Desdemona, sisters, 198. Oriental literature, 84-87. Orthodoxy, literary, in France, char- acteriz^l, 205-211, 288,289. {^^^ Sobriety); outgrown, 303, 304; its view of the poct's service, 334, 335- Ossian, a real poet, 326. Othello, characterized, 242, 243. Paul the apostle, characterized, 65, 69. People (the masses), their behavior at the théâtre, 307, 309 ; their need, the idéal, 310 ; their servants, the thinkers, 311; to them minds mnst be useful, 312, 313 ; com- plicity in their own oppression, 362, 363- Philistines {les bourgeois)^ their attitude toward works of poetic genius, 263-268. Pitt, William, his cost to England, 388, 389. Poet, the, his relation to the siiper- human, 37-40; his dangers and obstacles, 41 ; reality of his créa- tions, 195, 196; a philosopher and an historian, 195-202 ; the well- bred poet of the classic school, 209; the poet's method of créa- tion, 220 ; his f unction to produce types of human character, 219, 220, 223-227; his brusque ways, 268-271 ; his hospitality and ten- demess, 271-273 ; panders to the mob, 289-293 ; an instructor of the people, 296; his high duty, 301-302; his humanity, 318, 319; a civilizer, 322 ; need of vigilance, 328-330 ; of enthusiasm for useful work, 332, 333 ; capable of wrath, 333; sufferings of, 343-345- {^^ Poetry; Genius; Thinker.) Poetry, its ennobling and humaniz- tng influences, 95-98 ; its potential life, 116; its absolute and defimtiTe nature, 1 18-121 ; its two ears, 158; sovereign horror of great poetry, 196, 197; for the benefit of the people, 289-293 ; not for the Ict- tered alone, 303, 304 ; utility the true test of, 312, 324; goodness involves no loss of beauty, 320; poetry feared by oppressors, 324 ; honored in Middle Ages, 325 ; in Scotland, 326 ; dignified by its co- opération in the work of dviliza- tion, 335-338' Frinting, its value illustrated by the destruction of the works of Mjs^ chylus and others, 165-168. Prometheus, contrasted with Hamlet, 228-230; characterized, 230-232; the grandsire of Mab and Titania, 280-282. Ptolemy Evergetes, adds iSschylus to the Alexandrian library, 135- 138. Puritanism, its voluntary deafness, 357; its sensitiveness to Shake- speare's alleged impurity, 356- 360 ; its critidsm of Shakespeare, 360, 361. Pythagoras, erroneous beliefs of, m ; greater than Sesostris, 411. Rabelais, characterized, 71-76. Racine, his relation to Louis XIV., 333, 334 ; contrasted with Voltaire, ib. Révolution, the French, the mother of the nineteenth century, 371, 372 ; characterized, 372 ; roman- ticism and socialism sprung from '93, 373-376. Romantidsm, called "Ktcrary '93," 373-376. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, persecuted during life, 259 ; desecration of his grave, 260, 261. Salmasius, his opinion of ^schy- lus, 251. Scaliger, Joseph, anççdote of, 108. INDEX. 423 Science, the mission of, 38 ; its ten- tative, perfectible nature contrasted vith the absolute nature of art, 105-116; erroneous science of an- tiquity, 109» 113. Service, greatness to be gained in, 319- Shakespeare, William, birthplace, 9 ; coat of arms, 9 (and note); spelling of name, 10 (and note); abutcher, 10; frolics of youth, 10-12; mar- riage, 11; appearance and man- ners, 18 ; dates of plays, 19- 23 ; composition and publication of plays, 23-25 ; death of Hamnet and of John Shakespeare, 25 ; in- hibition of plays, 26; Quiney's letter, ib. ; New Place, 27 ; the Davenant story, ib,; daughters, 28 ; he retiims to Stratford, ib, ; the will and signatures, /^. ; death, 29 ; life embittered, ib, ; his great popularity, 31 (note) ; " éclipse " of his famé at the Restoration and in the eighteenth century, 32, 33 ; revisions of his plays, 34, 35 ; his genius characterized, 80--82 ; com- pared with Lucretius, 80; with Dante, 81 ; with Homer, 82 ; affin- ity with iEschylus, 169 ; disparag- îng criticisms upon him, 189-195 ; his tragic horror, 195-197; his philosophy immanent in his imag- ination, 198-202 ; his psychological insight, 201 ; his antithesis the an- tithesis of création, 203-205 ; his freedom from "sobriety," 211- 216; his simplidty, 212-214; his virility, 214-216; his agitation, 216, 217; compared with iEschy- lus by Prometheus and Hamlet, 228-239; double action in his dramas, 274-277 ; contrasted with ^schylus, 284 ; his independence and originality, 285-287 ; panders to the mob, 289-292 ; he is the chief glory of England, 348 ; con- trasted with Cromwell, Bacon, Newton, ib,; too English, 349; indecençy of, no greater than that , of the Bible, 356-358; less re- nowned in England than Calcraft, the hangman, 361 ; superfluity of a monument to him, 364-367 ; his centennial anniversaries, 368-370 ; his work greater than that of Charles V., 411, 412. Shylock, 224, 225. Sobriety in poetry, its emasculating effect, 205-211 ; not found in Shakespeare, 21 1-2 16. {See Ortho- doxy.) Socialism, the true, 297, 298 ; aims at freedom, 298-301. Socrates, his scepticism, 154-155. Sophocles, his opinion of iÊschylus, 251. Soûl, the, its genesis, 170-172; real- ity of its existence, 177, 178. Sparta, city of law, 349, 350; com- pared with England, ib, Staël, Madame de, on her exile, 257. Staffa, the bard's chair, 326. . Stage. {See Théâtre.) Statues {See Monument), England's statue of Shakespeare, 351 ; her statues of kings, gênerais, and statesmen, 351, 352. Swinbume's ' Study of Shakespeare/ 8 (note). Table-tipping, in the time of Homer, 39; of Theodosius, 39; in 371 A. D., 109, iio. Tacitus, characterized, 58-62; hâte* fui to officiai instructors, 397. Télescope, improvements in tiie, 106. Théâtre, the English, in Shake- speare*s time, 13-16; that of Molière, i6~i8; in England under the Puritans, 31; under the Stuart • Restoration, 31,32; that of A thens in the time of iEschylus, 126-131 ; that of the nineteenth century in- dependent of modds, 282-284; God's name prohibited in English, 359- Thinker, his mission to^ky, 377- 380; his discouragements, 380, 381 ; his beneficence and indepen- 424 INDEX. dence, 382-384; his place above the wamor and the monarch, 395 ; c^. 408-417. (5^^ Poet; Genius.) Tiberius, the emperor, characterized, 58» 59. Types of character produced by the poets, 223-227. Tyrants, not to be trusted, 328-330; acceptance of their oppression be- comes complicity, 362, 363; their blind cruelty, 391-394. Voltaire, reproached with kindness to young poets, 132 ; attacks upon Shakespeare, 192-194; reproadies Shakespeare with antithesis, 250, 251 ; is himself reproached with it, ib,; his remark upon Corneille and Shakespeare, 252; writers paid to insuit him, 255, 256, 257-259; desecration of his grave, 260, 261 ; his adviceto Louis XV., 306; com- paredwith Macchiavelli, ib.; Louis XV. calls him fool, 334; contrasted with Racine, ib.; typical of the French mind, 363 ; and Frederick the Great, 387; a dvilizer, 408. Vondel, Joost, denounced by Buy- ter, 255, 256. War, the décline of, 385-390. Writer. (^«Poet;Thmker; Genius.) 424 INDEX 1 If . B£RK| XVi >^S!ltttill I coooti»*^^^ ^ i " * ffillt 4 i '«p. %